


First You Get Close, Then You Get Worried

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 17:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 37,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5425592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of fics completed for an AU prompts meme on Tumblr, written between August and December 2015. Mostly Stan/Kyle, but one is Craig/Clyde. Some with art by Nhaingen!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 49. going through a divorce au

Stan looks back at his short, ridiculous life and wonders why he ever thought he knew anything. He traces his problems back to one long summer, the summer after his junior year of college, when he was still lying in bed, putting off his walk to work, and saw that he could now get married. Technically, he supposed, he’d had this right in Colorado for a while, but something about the Supreme Court decision that weird June morning made his brain start doing crazy things, like daydreaming about getting down on one knee and actually asking Kyle to marry him. It didn’t help that Stan was interning at the Center that summer, and the mood in the office was jubilant, nearly surreal. When Stan and Kyle met for lunch the first thing out of Kyle’s mouth was, “We should do it,” and perhaps out of sheer joy and definitely without considering the big issues, Stan just said, “Sure.” He took the rest of the afternoon off and went down to city hall, where he and Kyle filled out the paperwork and left, an hour later, as husbands.

It’s only nine years later that Stan is sitting across a boardroom table from Kyle in Kyle’s lawyer’s office, trying to make sense of why he ever thought getting married at 21 would be a great idea. He really loved Kyle, loves him still, and despite everything that’s happened, he can’t believe Kyle didn’t love him, either, or he wouldn’t have suggested it, like a crazy person, over lunch at the Jimmy John’s on Alameda the afternoon they found out about Obergefell.

But now Kyle loves some guy named Jasper who’s got a 10 percent stake in some blog post aggregator start-up app or something and, consequently, 30 million dollars. Stan has spent hours of his recent life awake in bed at night as he asks himself the existential question of why and how some guy with that much money, with season tickets to Opera Australia and a 1969 Corvette Stingray, also needs Kyle so badly. Kyle doesn’t like opera, he likes fart jokes, and he sure as hell can’t drive stick, and he’s been Stan’s best friend for 30 years and his husband for nine and now they’re sitting in this stupid room arguing over who gets custody of their corgi and whether it’s possible to sell their adjacent cemetery plots.

“I’d love to be able to recoup my money,” Kyle is saying, whilst he doodles aimlessly on a scrap of paper. “They’re good plots, and that stuff’s not cheap.”

“Oh, like you even need the money,” Stan spits out, and he instantly hates himself for it.

“Don’t respond to that,” says Kyle’s lawyer, a severe woman with an asymmetrical haircut. Those never work on anyone, but Kyle’s lawyer is working one right now, which somehow just serves to make Stan sadder.

Wendy is Stan’s lawyer. She grabs his thigh and gives him a squeeze, because it’s the only way she can offer him emotional support, which is verboten when she’s trying to be tough. “My client would like to keep his plot,” she says, shuffling through her notes. “We’d agree to allow a sale of Mr. Broflovski’s plot for half of the gross profit.”

“Both plots are joint acquisitions, though,” says Kyle’s lawyer, “so both should be liquefied.”

“Gotta bury me somewhere,” says Stan.

“Quit being so maudlin, Stan, you’ll live,” Kyle shoots back.

“Should we move on to the condo?” Wendy asks.

Kyle’s lawyer clears he throat. “My client would like a break for lunch.”

As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Kyle’s got his phone out. He’s probably reading sexts from Jasper or something, Stan figures, and he gets up and leaves the room before he can force himself to stand there and wait for Kyle to look up and give him a mean stare.

Wendy gets up and follows, saying, “Hey,” grabbing Stan by the shoulder, her pocketbook slung over her arm, like she’s in a rush. “Are you going out for a sandwich?”

“I can’t eat sandwiches anymore,” Stan moans, “we got engaged over sandwiches.”

“I know,” she says, “but sandwiches are pretty commonplace, so you can’t stop eating them forever.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“For lunch?”

Stan knows he should offer to take her out, because she’s doing this for him at a huge discount. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “I’m sorry. My life is falling apart.”

She grabs him. “I know it seems like that, but it’s not. You’ve got a good job, and you’re a great writer, and you seriously have to just hold it together until the end of the day so I can keep Kyle from taking all of your money, okay? I need you to hold it together. Can you do that for me?”

Without agreeing, Stan lets her tell him she’s going to bring him back something from Ba Le. Without much else to do but wait, Stan gets another watery coffee from the firm’s break room and sits down on a Barcelona ottoman in the lobby, directly across from the elevators. He hopes Wendy doesn’t get him anything with pate on it.

This whole experience is surreal; typically Stan would be at work, but all he can do is replay the best times in his relationship with Kyle. They had sex at 15, which was really young in retrospect; it was precocious, after homecoming, dirt from the football field still caked under Stan’s nails from a second-quarter sack. They lit candles, played a mix CD of cheesy 80s hits; why “Like a Prayer” made sense for their first time, Stan doesn’t know, but he’ll never be able to listen to that song without cringing ever again. They went to separate colleges, Stan at Boulder and Kyle at Kenyon, and by the time they got to junior year they knew they had to spend the summer in Denver together, they had to, because the distance was making them both crazy. It wasn’t all bad; they were better at phone sex than regular sex, at least back then, and Stan still remembers the Capitol Hill bedroom they sublet with its bohemian turret in the corner of the room and creaky floors that woke up their roommates the first time they dared sex before work. All summer they ate Velveeta shells and watched entire seasons of new comedies on Netflix and talked about what kind of life they wanted, now that they were married. They bought a townhouse in the neighborhood just two years ago, as if they both knew that was where it started. It had ended there, too, six months ago, with Kyle confessing that he’d met this other guy, and they’d been hooking up on business trips, and could Stan try to comprehend that maybe it wasn’t normal to marry someone you first fucked at age 15.

“I was a child then,” Kyle had said, “I didn’t really know what I wanted,” and he said it in that high-strung way that made it seem as if he was talking himself into it just as much as he was telling Stan. “I didn’t realize when I was a sophomore in high school that I was committing myself to, you know — this.”

The problem is that Stan loves this. He isn’t ready to let go of it. He’ll tell that to Wendy, when she gets back with his bahn mi. Stan isn’t going to be able to get through the afternoon. He’s accepted that he can’t fix it, but he still doesn’t know why this is happening.

It’s surreal when Kyle sits on the bench next to him and says, like it’s nothing, “This coffee is terrible.”

Stan goes stiff and nearly chokes and Kyle says, “Easy, hey,” and pats Stan on the back with the hand that’s not holding a coffee cup. It doesn’t help that Kyle looks amazing, just back from a business trip to LA where he got a new pair of slacks that fit him like he’s trying to prove a point. Stan himself could barely manage to get on any clothes this morning, and is wearing the same thing he wore yesterday, jeans and an oatmeal button-down.

“You don’t have to talk to me,” says Stan, and what he really means is “please don’t.”

“I like talking to you. Just because I don’t want to be married anymore doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to talk.”

“Why do you have to be like this?” Kyle asks.

“Because you’re ruining my life!” Stan’s voice nearly breaks when he says it, but it’s honest. He wishes Wendy would get the fuck back here already.

“Stanley, you’re 30,” says Kyle. “You’re not done yet. Your life’s barely started.”

“You’re wrong.” Stan is done with his coffee and he crushes the empty cup in his hand. It’s cathartic. “My life started the day you said you wanted to marry me. I wasn’t ready, okay? I wasn’t ready to be a grown-up. Maybe I wasn’t ready to commit to one person for the rest of my life.”

“So then this is a good thing, right?” Kyle sighs. “That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time — we were too young.”

“No,” says Stan, “fuck that. Because I loved you, and you wanted it, so what was I supposed to do — walk away? I wasn’t ready to get married, Kyle, but I didn’t want to give you up, either. And I have spent all of my life, all of it, building something with you. For you. I gave up my youth for you. Why isn’t that worth anything to you?”

“It’s worth a lot to me, Stan, but I don’t want to be married anymore.”

“What does Jasper say,” Stan asks, “about the fact that you skipped out on a 10-year marriage to be with him?”

“Oh, don’t bring Jasper into it.”

“Just answer the question!”

“Well.” Kyle pauses for a moment. He takes his hand off Stan’s back. “I’ve told him what I’ve told you many times: I was young, and I was caught up in a moment, and you were my best friend—”

“We were boyfriends.”

“—and I liked the idea of seizing on that moment, and I don’t know, I think Jasper gets that I’m flawed, and he’s okay with it, because he’s been around the block a few times and lived through the 80s and 90s or whatever, so I guess he understands that cheating on you makes me flawed but I’m still an okay person. I mean, Stan, you treat me like I’m some kind of ideal. But I’m just a person, you know? And we were better as friends, so, whatever.”

“I don’t want to be your friend! You’ve ruined my entire life.”

“Oh, jesus.” Kyle sighs again, and gets up. “Grow up, Stan. I didn’t want to be buried in South Park, anyway.” He tosses his cup in the garbage and Stan hears the leftover coffee splash against the side of the trashcan. “Just sell your fucking plot and I’ll let you keep the dog, okay? Think about it. I’d better go before that bitch Wendy catches me down here with you.” Kyle lunges for the elevator door, which is closing.

“Kyle,” Stan says weakly, but Kyle begins to slap his palm against a button. The doors close and Stan is left there, worse off than before.

It’s a depressingly real metaphor for Stan’s life.


	2. 4. teacher/single parent au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Art by Nhaingen!

This is humiliating in every possible respect: Stan is crammed into a child’s desk in his daughter’s fourth-grade classroom, his knees bumping against the underside of the storage compartment every time he shifts, the chipped wood of the chair poking sharply into his thighs. Why is it necessary, he wonders, to spend 45 minutes sitting on furniture built for a nine-year-old? But the second he stepped into the room, Esther’s teacher slapped his hand on the top of this desk and said, “Sit here,” and Stan hasn’t been in fourth grade for 40 years but he just obeyed like it might reflect badly on his kid if he didn’t, like both of them are bad apples.

“Essie got fractions just fine,” Stan is hearing, “but all of her progress in math is being hindered because she spends the whole period goofing around with her friends.”

“Why don’t you tell her to knock it off?” Stan asks. “She just needs to be reminded to listen sometimes.”

“Well, when I’m trying to teach a class, Mr. Marsh, I don’t have time to discipline every single child every time they speak out of turn. If you’ve been looking at her homework and tests, you know she’s getting the material just fine. The problem is that she won’t listen to me during class. She passes little notes to her friends. Sometimes she talks to them. There are 20 kids in this math class, so I don’t exactly have the time to halt everything each time your daughter speaks out of turn, you know?”

“Um.” Stan feels like he’s being tested, like this guy is waiting to hear what Stan has to say. “Well, uh, why is it only in math?”

“Because Esther’s in advanced math, which I teach, and when we split up the grade into sections, I guess some of her friends come in. She’s perfectly well-behaved in other classes.”

“I didn’t know you, um, split up the classes like that. For math.”

“Were you not at parents’ orientation at the beginning of the year?”

Now Stan feels horrible. “No.”

“Did somebody come, like — Mrs. Marsh?”

And now Stan feels smug. “There is no Mrs. Marsh,” he says, pushing the chair away from the desk. “Did you not know that?”

“I honestly didn’t,” is the answer, and Stan honestly pities this poor man, all of a sudden. “Essie’s pretty well-behaved, you know, I didn’t mean to — it’s just math that’s the problem. Just in that one session.”

“Mr. Broflovski—” Stan begins.

“You can call me Kyle.”

“Okay. Kyle.” Stan sighs. He has to do this every year. “Don’t be easy on her because she hasn’t got a mother. I signed up for this. I can handle it.”

“You signed up for — parent-teacher conferences?”

“No,” says Stan, “adopting a kid.”

“Yeah.” Kyle shuffles back to his desk at the front of the classroom. He slumps against it, rubbing his eyes — to do so, he has to slid his fingers under his glasses, which pushes up his hair. It’s coppery, and Stan imagines when Kyle was younger it was richer, deeper, a redder auburn. “Sorry, you’re the last session of the day, I’m kind of — I’ve been at this since 2.” It’s now nearing 8:30.

“Sorry I held you up, then. I didn’t realize — I guess I didn’t consider that, you know, you probably had to be here at like 7—”

“Try 6:30.” Kyle’s posture slumps and Stan studies the way his sweater is just a little too small in the sleeves, showing off fine golden hairs on Kyle’s slim wrists under the harsh fluorescent lighting. “Some people drop their kids off that early on the way to work. It’s frightening. I mean, I feel bad for the kids, they’re only 9, but I’m not a babysitter, you know? So I hope you can understand why I wouldn’t waste my time trying to discipline Essie in math class. I do enough of that. I came her to teach, not to provide free childcare to the under-employed. And now it’s nearly 9 and I’m not going to get home for another hour at least and I’m startving.“

“Oh, um.” Stan has no idea what to say; it’s only November, and up to this point, Stan’s only reaction with Esther’s teacher has been signing her corrected spelling quizzes. “Man, that does sound hard. I’m sorry. Just so you know, I appreciate it. I mean, that you’re teaching my kid. I like teachers. I had some pretty good teachers growing up.”

“Yeah? Well, guess what, I didn’t. That’s why I did this. And now I suck too. Oh my god, this is the worst. Have you had dinner?”

“No, I came here from work.”

“Okay. Do you want to?”

“Do I want to what?”

“Go get dinner,” says Kyle. “There’s a Mexican place and a sushi place in the strip mall two blocks in that direction.” He gestures weakly toward what Stan thinks is the parking lot.

“I prefer sushi,” Stan says, though what he meant to say was, “I am 99 percent sure it is wildly inappropriate for me to socialize with my daughter’s teacher.” Still, Stan finds himself agreeing to meet Kyle at Sushi Edo II in 20 minutes after Kyle wipes down the dry-erase board and locks up the supply cabinets. He calls home and tells his sister, who’s watching Esther, that the conference ran longer than expected. “But don’t tell Esther that,” Stan stresses, “because she’ll freak out.”

“Why, is she awful? Is the teacher spilling all the dirty on the sick shit she gets up to?”

“Shelly, what? No! Why are you even saying that–”

“Esther’s in the shower. Look, if you’re not back here by 10 I’ll be officially annoyed.”

“I will, I will,” Stan assures her, though he has no idea how long he’ll be out. “There are just a lot of people here. Lots of, um, parents. And teachers.” It would be nice if Stan felt bad about inconveniencing his sister, but he doesn’t; her sons are both out of college.

“Whatever,” Shelly says before she hangs up, and it’s clear she thinks he’s up to something sketchy. The years have made him immune to his family’s judgment, though he remains grateful for their support of his midlife crisis, which, quite unlike the midlife crises of the other men Stan knows, did not end with him dumping his lover of 15 years or getting Botox or buying any kind of car. Stan’s been driving the same car since he was 30 and it’s fine, thank you. No, Stan woke up at age 40 and decided he wanted to be a father. The ironic thing is that he’s fully aware that this was in many ways millions of times more irresponsible than, say, getting a really gaudy ear piercing. In Stan’s defense, he did that when he was in fourth grade, actually, so that option was off the table. As he pulls off his blazer and loosens his tie, running into the restaurant, he laments the fact that whatever he’s about to do, even if it doesn’t go farther than Philadelphia rolls, will probably be irresponsible, too.

Stan gets two seats at the sushi bar, orders a bottle of sake, and texts Shelly a request for a picture of Esther in her pajamas before Kyle shows up. In the restaurant’s dim lighting Kyle looks a lot better. “Is that sake?” he asks, pulling out a stool.

“Yes,” Stan says, beginning to pore over the menu. “What do you eat? I mean, fish-wise.”

“I always get the $18.95 all-you-can-eat deal.” Even in the dim lighting, it’s clear that Kyle’s blushing. “I’m here, like, once a week.”

“I lived in Tokyo for a year,” Stan says, for no actual reason. He’s so nervous he starts putting hash marks next to nigiri without even looking at what he’s ordering. Two tako? Whatever. Tamago? Why not. Negi-hamachi? Stan’s never even had that, but he’s willing to try.

“How’d you end up there?”

“It was a business thing.”

“What kind of business do you do?” Kyle asks.

“Just financial – shit, I don’t know, it’s not interesting. Nothing noble.”

“Well, what’s your idea of ‘noble’ work?” Kyle asks, pouring some sake into the wooden box in front of him.

“Teaching is, clearly.”

Kyle snorts into his box of sake and puts it back down, trying not to spit anything out. “You must be shitting me. Do you know why I moved here?”

“Um, no.”

“Well, I’m from New Jersey.”

“Okay.” Stan pauses. “Aren’t a lot of people?”

“I guess,” says Kyle. “Anyway, I moved to Manhattan when I was 18 to go to Columbia. I got an M.Ed–”

“A what?”

“A master’s of eduction. I worked in hoity-toity private schools, right? For 20 years. And then one day my dad died, and I sat down with a financial planner, and I found out I had no money.”

“What do you mean you didn’t have any money?”

“I mean, I had money, but I wasn’t saving any money. And my dad didn’t exactly leave me anything, it all went to my mom, so, basically, I had no retirement savings. I spent everything I had living in New York for the past three decades. I literally cannot afford to live in New York anymore.”

“Why don’t you move to Brooklyn?”

“Oh, please.” Kyle takes another sip of sake, and Stan watches him swallow it. Kyle’s neck is pale, nicked with little razor burns. Stan wants to press his mouth against it. He quells the thought by stuffing an edamame pod into it. “So anyway,” Kyle continues, “I started shopping around and got a job in the Denver suburbs. Cute, right? I’m just happy to be out of the city. Everyone’s so superficial there.”

“I’m sorry to break this to you,” says Stan, “but we’re superficial here, too.”

“Well, at least admit I’m not noble.”

“Isn’t getting to school at 6:30 to watch people’s kids’ noble?”

“No, it’s not, it’s stupid, and anyway, why do you think I went into teaching in the first place? I wanted the summer off so I could spend it on Fire Island. Ugh, I’m a disaster.” Kyle empties his sake box and slams it on the sushi bar. “I will understand if you want Essie moved to 4-B, though I’m sorry to report I am the only advanced math teacher for all of fourth grade, so she’s stuck with me there.”

A platter of sushi is set down before Stan and Kyle. Stan picks up the low-sodium soy sauce and considers his response. “As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “Fire Island peaked in 1977.”

Kyle picks up a tamago nigiri with his fingers and dips it, egg down, into the soy sauce; Stan finds this hugely impressive, since that’s the right way to do it, or so he’s been told. “So true,” Kyle agrees, a grin on his face.

An hour later they’re back in Esther’s fourth-grade classroom, Kyle hefting himself onto one of the kid’s desks while Stan fumbles with the condom he keeps for no good reason other than fatherly overpreparedness in his gym bag. The last time he hooked up with someone at Cherry Creek Athletic Club on his lunch break was … well, it was last month, but the point is, he has a condom, so what’s the worst that can happen, and also, sauna jack-offs are very 1990s. Now it’s all about fucking Kyle over this desk, which is a new nadir in Stan’s depraved repertoire. He thinks back to when he sat down at one of these puny desks and worried about Kyle judging him. Stan laughs at the memory.

“What’s funny?” Kyle asks. He has to take one of his wrists out of Stan’s mouth to get an answer.

“I think I might need to get Essie into the other class,” Stan says. “If we’re gonna do this again.”

“Oh my god,” Kyle pants, and he comes, half on his sweater and half on Stan’s bare stomach. “That’s the hottest thing I ever heard.”

“What is?” Stan asks, against Kyle’s mouth.

“Doing it again,” Kyle replies, and so Stan says it while he fucks Kyle so hard the desk begins to move back and knocks into the one behind it: “We’re going to do it again.” Stan has literally never fucked anyone twice before. It’s the best possible thing that could have come out of this experience.

He comes home tired, with childish hickeys up and down his shoulders, like he’s 16 goddamn years old, to an earful from his sister about how Esther’s pissed he didn’t come in to say goodnight to her and now Shelly isn’t going to get any sleep and she has yoga tomorrow at 10 and she needs to be there at 9:45 because there’s never any good parking.

“What the fuck were you doing?” she bitches, while Stan pulls a beer out of the fridge. “You’re drinking at midnight? Who are you, Dad? What the fuck?”

Stan just shrugs. “Thanks for watching Essie,” he says. Stan and Kyle have a date on Friday night. Stan makes a mental note to ask Shelly about babysitting tomorrow, when she’s no longer pissed.

Then he makes a mental note to get up early and make Essie pancakes for breakfast while he breaks it to her that she’s going to have to change homerooms. He doubts she’ll care. She doesn’t like her teacher very much anyway.


	3. 10. high school popular kid/nerd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some kind of 1950s pastiche.

Another Saturday afternoon has arrived and, at their post-practice lunch at the Lucky Diner on Main, Stan is once again trying to talk Kyle into coming out for the evening. As usual, they split a BLT club with a side of fries, two pickles, and a strawberry milkshake. By now, their waitress knows to bring an extra cup.

“I don’t know,” Kyle mumbles into his shake, thin pink stain over his upper lip. “I have a lot of homework.”

It’s a lie and Stan knows it. “No you don’t,” he says; they do their homework together on Friday nights, especially in the fall, when Stan has to go to football practice the next morning and he wants the extra focus. This is their third year with this routine, eleventh grade, and it’s as comfortable as the leaves dropping to the gutters, more and more each day, as the balm of late August turns to the brittle chill of late September. Under the table, Stan’s foot strokes against Kyle’s calf for a moment, and Kyle looks away, back into his shake.

“I do too,” he says hoarsely, “and you haven’t even told me where you’re going, anyway.”

“There’s a bonfire at Stark’s Pond,” Stan says. “Everyone’ll be there.”

“Not one person would notice if I weren’t there.”

“Yes, Kyle, I would.”

This is the hard choice. Kyle wants to be with Stan all of the time; they’ve just begun to kiss quickly and lightly on the lips when no one’s watching them, when it’s clear they’re alone. Last year Stan dated pretty Wendy from his home economics class; she was smarter than her looks belied but at Park County High, any girl over a C-cup gets pegged as a slut. Wendy softly and charitably left Stan last winter with the warning that he’d better do some soul-searching, the end result of which was a knock on Kyle’s back door and a peck on the brow and an invitation to go steady.

Kyle’s the more grounded of the two of them, so he answered with an audible shush and “you’re crazy” and pulling Stan inside the house, where they stood in the darkened kitchen and quietly appreciated each other for a moment: Kyle in his two-piece pajamas, worn slippers, expression of mild alarm; Stan in a toggle parka with slush melting under his mukluks — a gift from his father, who every February goes to Glacier Bay to take sediment samples — and the too-long, unbrushed hair that Kyle swears is the key to Stan’s well-liked reputation around school. People want to like a non-conformist, Kyle long ago realized, but it’s got to be someone like Stan, someone safe, who plays placekicker in the fall and center-forward in the spring. Kyle aspired to play basketball, but the coach dismissed him on account of his height, or lack thereof. Stan, meanwhile, does everything, all of the musicals and plays, football and soccer, is the only guy taking home economics; he’s had a poem published in a small literary magazine out of San Francisco, which sent Stan a check for five dollars in the mail as a prize. He also plays guitar a little, strumming tuneful renditions of folk ditties rather than songs per se.

Kyle imagines Stan will get the guitar out at the bonfire tonight, but even if he doesn’t people will love him still: for being what everyone expects and more, actually, things people never really knew they wanted until Stan decides to do them. Kyle has dreams of leaving this diner and pulling Stan off-road into the forests around town, where couples go and neck if they don’t want to be seen; if they do want to be seen they park on Hell’s Pass and turn their lights off so they can fool around with the dim lights of the town below, twinkling especially bright against the early snow and under a blanket of faraway stars.

“I’ll go to the bonfire with you,” Kyle says, knocking his palm against the bottom of the up-turned ketchup bottle, “if you do something for me.”

“What’s that?” Stan asks. He pulls the American flag pick out of the quartered stack of sandwich he’s about to devour.

The truth is Kyle didn’t have anything in mind, so he mumbles, “I’m not sure, we’ll see,” and groans when Ketchup comes splashing onto his plate, some of which makes it onto his face. Stan bats his lashes and dips a corner of his napkin in his water glass. Used to humiliation — Eric Cartman has made that his goal since kindergarten — Kyle can’t possibly mind that Stan is dabbing at his face with maternal regard; the town treats him like Stan’s dear little brother, a curiosity in thick-framed glasses who haunts the edges of football games. Every weekend their waitress asks him if he should really be drinking a milkshake, on account of he’s a diabetic. And it’s true, maybe Kyle shouldn’t, but it’s not as if he’s drinking a whole one, he’s splitting it with Stan, and anyway, what’s half a milkshake once a week and, more to the point, how is anyone supposed to live like this in this stifling town, or even at all? Kyle can’t deprive himself of everything worth having forever simply because other people think they know what’s best for him. It might destroy him, slowly; it probably will, but at least he will have lived a little. He’s top-ranked in his class — actually, all of Park County — and if anyone even knows he exists, they think he’s Stan’s little shadow. No matter that Stan carries _his_ books. They’d all die if they knew Stan corrupted _him_. Stan’s the one who wants to suck Kyle off when his parents are at church. Stan’s the one who talks about running off to New York and joining the service so he can see ports across the ocean and the men who populate them. Stan wants Kyle to stick his fingers in unforgivable places. And yet Kyle is the weird one? At least he has a proper sense of shame.

Begrudgingly, Kyle agrees, “All right, I’ll go,” and he sighs into the last gulp of his milkshake. He’s got a headache all afternoon from the hyperglycemia, but it’s worth it. He can live with the consequences, but he can’t live without the reward.

* * *

It turns out to be just some kids from the town, which is a relief; Kyle hates when other kids from the county show up and start horsing around South Park with their cans of Coors and unfiltered cigarettes and, oftentimes, deeper hick attitudes about things that drive Kyle batty, like cow-tipping, which some kids from up North Park and even Fairplay like to do on weekend nights sometimes, and reading, which for many of the local ranching families is just outright called “queer.” This is why Kyle sits at the front in all of his classes, so the authority of the teacher can form a protective barrier around him. Stan wants to go to New York and Kyle does, too, not because he wants to ship out (he does not want that, though he knows he’ll have to go into the service sometime) but because he wants to spend the summer there before he goes to Princeton in two falls, because he knows if he’s stuck in this cow-town for the rest of his life he’ll die, he’ll just die. He’s already dying, slowly, from his pancreas-out; he might as well live a bit.

To Kyle’s great dismay Stan is already there, tending to the fire while he drinks a beer and chats idly with other boys from the town: Kenny, who’s got a narrow face and no pride, will do anything for a buck, always seems dirty regardless of time of day or season; Clyde, whose paunchy self-regard is bolstered by the rotating cast of girlfriends he woos into the back room of his father’s shoe store; Craig, who is a shit-stirrer, though he plays this off by demurring when asked for an opinion. Kyle hates all of them except Stan, because except for Stan they all treat Kyle like a nonentity. Once Craig told him, “You’re so moralizing, it’s the worst,” but Kyle’s right that it’s illegal to drink, silly to drink and drive, definitely stealing to lead a pony off Jenkins’ farm for any kind of shady purpose, trespassing to break into the school at night to get basketballs from the gymnasium, and a crying shame to shoot rabbits just to hoist their lifeless pelts into the air and scream bloody murder like such a thing were fun. Stan doesn’t hunt, either, but when Stan doesn’t do it, people regard it as ethical.

It’s probably because Stan’s come down here to build a bonfire in his letter jacket, all smiles after his impressive punting accuracy in scrimmage earlier in the day. He first offers Kyle a sip of brandy from a flask he keeps in the back pocket of his jeans, and it burns its way to Kyle’s stomach like the bad feelings he gets when his mother talks about where he’s going to find a nice Jewish girl to date in rural Colorado. More than he wants to tell her he’s stealing off to the East Coast the first chance he gets, he wants to tell her that she can’t blame him for failing to meet the set of impossible expectations she personally invalidated, as if the very concept of other Jews around here weren’t ludicrous. It’s on his mind because she nagged him about it again this afternoon, after he told her he was going to come down here after dinner and she assumed, stupidly, he was probably after sex. He would really like that, though it’s not to be had. Stan says his uncle goes to the rest stop off of US 285 sometimes to go to a “tearoom,” and Kyle doesn’t know where Stan got this information since his uncle Jimbo is verifiably tight-lipped about literally everything else (they tried, earnestly) and spends more time rattling off stories about the war in the Pacific than he does anything else. Also, that man’s got a roommate, a one-armed guy named Ned who lost his larynx and doesn’t speak but croaks, and if Jimbo’s running off to some tearoom while he leaves Ned to fend for himself, well, that’s the thing that makes Kyle most queasy.

When Stan gets up and walks over to Kyle, he smells like soot and the perfume of smoking leaves. With his sour aftershave and sweet perspiration the scent makes Kyle want to swoon right into the bonfire and burn up forever. Stan says, “You made it,” and Kyle says, “Well, I did promise,” and they look at each other askance for a moment, doing what they always do, which is take in each other’s bodies and try to imagine themselves wrapped together.

Some girls huddled in their own group — brassy Bebe with her daring bob, Wendy with her voluptuous pincurls, Red with pink lips and blue lids like a Maidenform ad — call out to Stan, asking him to play something on his guitar, which Wendy is stroking casually, those perfectly filed nails of hers too long to pick at the strings effectively, though Kyle heard her do it when they were kids, and she’s better than Stan is, or was.

“I’ll be back,” Stan shouts to them, and he walks with Kyle 15 feet into the woods, away from the sound of beer cans clinking on the ground when the boys are done drinking them. Branches snap under Stan’s feet as he clears a path and, when they’re far enough away, Kyle hooks his fingers into Stan’s back pocket, since he thinks he might trip under the moonlight and only for whatever reasons trusts Stan to navigate off the municipal trails around the pond.

“Listen,” Stan says, and he pulls something front his front interior pocket. “I really need you to read this.” It’s a book, a slim book wrapped in brown paper, and he hands it to Kyle. Kyle turns it in his hands, trying to imagine what it is. Sometimes Stan gets little chapbooks of poetry for which he sends away to presses; this would be an awfully thick chapbook. “It’s a Gore Vidal novel,” Stan says, and there’s some weight to his voice.

“Where’d you get it?” Kyle asks. He doesn’t know who that is.

“He wrote _Williwaw_ , which my uncle had, and I started doing some snooping, and I came up with this.” Stan’s voice is so shaky Kyle wants to cover Stan’s mouth with his gloved hands. “I read it. I need you to read it. Please don’t ascribe the bad parts to me, just the good.”

“And what’re the good parts, to you?” Kyle asks.

“The parts about need,” Stan says. “The parts about knowing a place of rightness and wanting to get back to that place. I don’t endorse the bad parts, but this book is haunting me.”

“Thank you.” Kyle turns the package over in his hands, unsure what he wants to say about it. He hates the thought of Stan being haunted. Stan is beloved; Stan could be _his_ beloved, if Kyle could make it so. “Is this what I get for agreeing to come here tonight?”

“No.” Now Stan sounds hoarse as he blathers a little, and from the same pocket he produces his varsity football pin. “Since I heard about that tearoom it’s all been weighing on me,” Stan says.

“So what’s this?” Kyle asks. “Did Wendy give it back to you?”

“Yeah, she says she doesn’t want to be with anyone now. So I guess it’s a promise.”

“What kind of promise?”

“That I’m never gonna go to that place off 285.”

“Maybe Jimbo would take you, if you asked,” Kyle says.

“Maybe.” Stan shrugs, and Kyle swears he sees moonlight in the waterlines of Stan’s lower lids. “But I don’t want to. I want to go to New York. With you, okay, summer after next. If you read that book and you hate me after it you can give me the pin back.”

“Won’t people want to know who you gave it to?”

“They’ll assume I gave it to some Park County girl,” Stan says, and it’s true, people will make that assumption.

Before they go back to the bonfire, Stan forces Kyle to hide the book and the pin inside his pea coat, and to take an armful of kindling out of the woods. They both return with twigs and wet leaves, which Stan tells his friends they’ve gathered for the fire.

“I could build a pile twice this big,” Eric Cartman tells everyone, snapping little bits off a pinecone, tossing them into the flames.

“No you couldn’t,” Kyle says, hardly thinking, “only Stan could.” In his pocket his fingers clench around the pin: only Stan. The back sticks into Kyle’s palm and it hurts for a moment before the shock fades away again. _Only Stan._


	4. 45. nanny/single parent au

Shiri Broflovski is a little shit; Stan’s known her for all of half an hour and that’s plain as day. She sits at the kitchen table eating chocolate pudding with her hands and glaring at Stan like he personally murdered her mother. This kid is 8 and Stan’s honestly got no idea if her mother’s dead or just not around or if such a woman ever even existed; he’s been here for under an hour and all he’s learned about this girl and her father is that their McMansion probably cost way too much to decorate and it still doesn’t look good, and also, whoever this kid’s last nanny was didn’t do a very good job. Stan can tell the father probably hasn’t been especially present; he and Shiri don’t look each other in the eyes or even display body language that speaks to a comfort with being in the same room. Instead, they both look at Stan, who’s prepared lunch for them and brought it over so he can be interviewed as they sample his cooking.

The first course was a salad; the second a tuna-noodle casserole. Now they’re eating pudding in little ramekins as Stan tries to explain how he got into nannying as a career: “My parents had another kid when I was 12, so I spent most of my adolescence and teen years taking care of my sister. I have another sister who’s four years older, so she was really too grown up to bond with Sonia much, though I guess they get along. Essentially I’m the glue.”

Kyle Broflovski leans over the table; he’s already demolished his little portion of pudding. “Your parents had another kid when you were 12?”

“We’re Catholic,” Stan says airily. Most people just make faces, don’t even ask.

“I see.” Kyle sits up straighter, clears his throat. “We’re not Catholic. Do you practice?”

“Not really,” says Stan. “The church doesn’t really jibe with my lifestyle.”

“Being a nanny?” Kyle asks, typing all of this on an iPad, not even looking at it. Beside him, Shiri is licking pudding off of her fingers. She’s got that shitty look on her face kids sometimes get: “Just try and fucking stop me.” Maybe Stan is being tested, but her father’s sitting right there. Kyle could stop her, if he even notices.

“I’m gay.” Stan tries to tell people this upfront, because it’s going to come out eventually.

“Oh. Well, we’re Jewish. Shiri goes to Hebrew school on Thursday afternoons and Sunday mornings. I hope that’s all right.”

“Why wouldn’t that be all right?”

“Because you’ll have to practice Hebrew with her,” says Kyle. “She’s not doing as well as I’d hoped.” This is the first time a potential client hasn’t bent over backward to assure Stan they’re cool with his sexuality and definitely trust him with their children, their uncle/ godmother/pediatrician is gay, no worries — to the point of awkward liberal discomfort that indicated some deeper insecurities Stan doesn’t have time to parse. Almost certainly this is the first time anyone’s told him he’s going to have to hoof it with Hebrew.

But all in all, it’s not concern of Stan’s: “Languages were always a strong suit of mine.” This is true. He studied abroad in Colombia as a college junior, and lived for two years as an au pair with a family in Salamanca. “I’m fluent in Spanish and decent with Portuguese and Italian.”

“Yes, that was on your resume.” Kyle glances down at his iPad and furrows his brows. He looks up again. “Seriously,” he says, “how does a middle-aged man end up working as a nanny?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Stan’s not sure if he should be insulted. “I’m good with kids?”

“Why didn’t you have any of your own?”

“Not meaning to be obstinate,” Stan says, “but that’s got literally nothing to do with my ability to look after other people’s.”

Kyle sighs and hands his iPad to Shiri. “Go play,” he says, not even looking at her. She gets up, and is about to push her chair in. “Don’t even,” Kyle says, still looking at Stan. “You’ll get pudding everywhere.”

When she’s gone, her footsteps receding down the hall, Kyle sighs and rubs his eyes. “Look,” he says, “I’m not going to pretend this is going to be easy. Shiri’s a nightmare.”

“So I assume the pay is commensurate?”

“If you get the job,” Kyle says, but he’s already shaking his head. “Actually, fuck it, I don’t have time to interview anyone else. Wanna see the bedroom?”

“Which bedroom?” Stan asks.

“The one you’ll be sleeping in.”

Stan blinks. “I have an apartment,” he says.

“But you – this is a live-in gig.”

“That’s not what your ad said.”

“Jesus, then I forgot to revise it. What can I do to get you to move in?”

Stan’s never had one of those nannying gigs, honestly, the ones where it’s around-the-clock and you move into the parents’ home. Frankly, he’s not sure he wants one of those. But Kyle’s looking at him like he wants a response, and beyond the stern tone of Kyle’s voice, Stan can also see the little cracks in his facade, the desperation. Here’s a man who needs help.

“I’d do it for a 25-percent increase, another week of vacation, and Christmas off. That’s Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.”

“My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas,” Kyle says.

“Well, mine does. It’s fairly standard, actually, to get Christmas off. In the industry.”

“The nannying industry?” Kyle looks incredulous.

“Most people do, look. Do you want to talk to some other people first, give me a call later?” Stan has other interviews this week. He doesn’t have to be here.

“I’m at the end of my rope,” says Kyle. “The service won’t staff us anymore. I don’t know what to do.”

Immediately Stan wants to say, well, do you have parents? You could spend less time at the office, spend more time with your daughter — but Stan also knows he’s not up on all the details of this man’s life. All he knows is Kyle is a genitourinary surgeon with a hellacious 8-year-old who’s trying to talk a man into moving into his house to raise his daughter. It’s moving and dispiriting at the same time.

“Most people are off on Christmas,” Stan says, “so they can usually watch their own children.”

The look on Kyle’s face implies that this is not something he wants to do, ever. “Well, you drive a hard bargain,” he says, staring into his empty ramekin. Stan notices that he has careful, deliberate hands, a tuneful voice, and a considered speech pattern.

Stan’s last job was with a family of Danes, an aeronautical engineer and his wife, a foreign policy expert. They’d come to Denver for a two-year fellowship that left them needing someone to calmly walk the three blond-haired, blue-eyed children through the rigors of American schooling. By the end Stan felt like a member of the family. They’ve invited him to come stay with them in Roskilde, and much to his dismay, Stan found that he missed them over Christmas. When they left, he cried a little. Those kids reminded him of his little sister, not in the way they looked (Sonia has black hair, like Stan does) but in how musical they were, how plainly overjoyed with their own little lives, naturally happy children. Stan doesn’t want to admit this, but it was easy with those kids — and those parents — because they were good people anyhow, people who probably didn’t need a nanny anyway, or at least would have been fine without one.

People who actually need nannies are nightmares. Stan tries not to work for those people. That’s the difference, really; Stan hates to work for anyone. He would rather work with a family that needs an extra set of hands, wants an extra perspective. He does not want to raise someone’s children for them.

So why he’s compelled to accept this job is beyond him. Kyle agrees to pay the penalty on Stan’s broken lease, which is generous; it’s somewhat disconcerting that he has to remind Kyle to do so five or six times. Each reminder comes with Kyle’s apology, “It slipped my mind,” and Stan believes him. But that doesn’t make it less annoying.

The day Stan moves in, Shiri hides behind furniture, her big blue eyes ringed in sallow gray skin, maybe from crying. The room Stan’s been given is off-limits to her, and since he doesn’t start officially until tomorrow, he takes some time fixing it up, putting his own sheets on the bed and plugging in his lamps, putting his books on the shelves and neatly arranging his clothing in dresser drawers. A chronic hoarder, Stan hasn’t got much; he doesn’t allow himself to keep many memories. He puts a picture of himself and his sisters on his nightstand, along with one of his parents. He gets along with his own family but not to the point of best-friendship; he never clicked with Shelly until adulthood, and Sonia was too young. She’s more like a surrogate daughter to him, which is unfortunate, but it’s also true that when she was 12 and still very young, Stan was already an adult with a car and a dog and a boyfriend, two jobs (bartending in addition to nannying) and college debt. He’s paid the debt off now, the dog died, and that boyfriend’s long gone, but now Stan looks back at Sonia, 28 and engaged, and wishes they were closer in age so they could have been better friends. That’s all he puts in his room.

It’s a Saturday and Kyle is home; Shiri peeks in around the doorframe and every few minutes; Kyle walks by and chides her not to do that. She’s the biggest question mark in this venture; Kyle seems normal, if detached, kind of distracted by work and whatever consumes the attentions of men who hoof it on the actual job track. When he comes in to give Stan a check for the moving fees and penalty, Stan says, “Shiri can come in here to say hi, if she’s curious.” He’s just arranging his books by subject and then by author. He does a lot of reading.

“She shouldn’t lurk like that,” Kyle says, ripping the check out of a leather fold. “This is your space, you know, you don’t have to keep the door open. Kids should have boundaries. You can teach her some.”

“Okay, well, how about this,” Stan suggests, loud enough so that Shiri can hear, “if she comes in and looks around, it might be easier to enforce that boundary, because then my room’s not some crazy secret.”

“But your private space should be a secret.”

“Private doesn’t mean secret,” Stan says. He addresses Shiri. “Do you want to come in?”

She creeps over the threshold in a pair of calf-length leggings and a puffy princess dress that Stan figures is only meant to be worn on Halloween. She clutches the skirt and backs up against a wall. There’s that look of mild hatred on her face, like she’s resents Stan’s presence entirely.

“You’re going to behave,” Kyle says to her, “or you’re out of here.”

“It’s okay.” Stan sits down on the bed and puts his hands in his lap. He’s trying to be nonthreatening. “Hey, Shiri.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Hi.”

“Be nice,” says Kyle.

“She’s not being not nice,” says Stan. It makes Shiri crack a smile.

“You’re going to do everything Stan tells you to do,” says Kyle. “He uprooted his life to come live with us and he’s not cheap, so you’d better be nice or you’ll regret it.”

Shiri stops smiling and runs out of the room.

“What a little shit.” Kyle sits on the bed next to Stan. “What did I do to deserve such a horrible child?”

There are so many things Stan could stay, starting with, “Well, you’re totally bullying her.” Instead, he takes a soft tone and says, “It’s hard being a little kid, and meeting a new person — having a new person move into your house. It’s scary.”

“She has nannies all the time.”

“Okay, but kids like stability. To her I’m probably just one in a parade of random people who aren’t you.”

“Me?” Kyle asks. “Please. The kid could hardly give less of a shit about me. I’m not her mother, so fuck me.”

“You’d better tell me what happened to her mother,” Stan says, though he knows this is prying.

“Well, like most women I’ve been intimate with, she fled.” Kyle is worrying his thumbs together, not looking Stan in the eyes. “I say that like I’m intimate with a lot of women, but it’s actually just her. I tried. I couldn’t do it.”

“Couldn’t do what?”

“Be a good husband or whatever,” Kyle says, “I don’t know. I don’t blame Rebecca for leaving. She’s a surgeon, too. You can’t compete in this town, it’s too small. I just wish she’d taken Shiri with her. I’m not the one who wanted a kid.”

When Kyle looks up, Stan tries not to appear horrified. “When did this happen?” Stan asks.

“About six years ago. So I should probably be over it, right?”

“That’s not being fair to yourself,” says Stan. “How do you get over something like that?”

“I’m afraid of myself,” Kyle confesses. “I don’t think I can get over it.”

Stan doesn’t know what to do, but he realizes something: he should not have taken this job. He’s certain about that. It’s a relief to see that Shiri’s not as bad as Kyle made her out to be, but at the same time, Stan also sees that he’ll be babysitting Kyle nearly as much as Shiri. He likes Kyle, he finds, as they go over an afterschool schedule and put together a meal plan for the week; Kyle is funny, self-deprecating, and honest. But he’s also self-pitying, needlessly cruel to Shiri, and too open, bordering on inappropriate. They sit in Kyle’s office under two nineteenth-century anatomical diagrams, one of the male body and the other of the male genitalia — at least, that’s how they’re labelled. On his iPad, Kyle makes notes on what Stan will make for dinner: a lentil soup Monday, grain bowls Tuesday, tuna casserole Wednesday, and so on. They eat leftovers on Thursday and Kyle goes out Friday nights.

“Who do you go out with?” Stan asks. He figures that he probably should know.

“No one,” Kyle says. “I just go by myself.”

“What if Shiri and I came with you?”

Kyle seems horrified by this. Stan feels awful, because he’s aware that she’s hiding in the closet, the door cracked open just enough for her to stare at them. “It might be nice,” Stan clarifies, “for all of us to do something together?” If Kyle and Shiri are to ever be alone — if that’s something Kyle even wants — it’s something he’ll probably have to work up to.

“I guess.” Kyle shrugs. “I’ll try anything once, I guess, why not.” His fingers fly against his tablet as he makes this change, chewing on the nails of his other hand, bare feet on the bare floor. His legs are spread, his expression vexed. He looks up. “It’ll be a disaster.”

“Everything’s a disaster with that attitude,” Stan says. It’s the first time he’s been truly irritated with Kyle.

And now Kyle is irritated with him. “Look, Mary Poppins, I didn’t hire you to teach me how to love again. Just make sure my kid doesn’t overflow the bathtub while I’m fucking with people’s pelvic floors and this will go a lot easier.” He turns back to the iPad and swivels his chair away from Stan a few degrees. On the bookshelf behind him is a model of the human kidneys.

“In that case, call me if you need me.” Stan gets up and straightens out his T-shirt. He sees Shiri gazing at him with awe, the closet door open a little wider now.

“Sure, sure.” Kyle is still glued to tablet, sucking on his index finger. He looks up, briefly, linking his eyes with Stan. Kyle goes pink and averts his gaze, sitting up straighter. “See you at dinner.”

“I’m going out for dinner,” Stan announces, “since I don’t start until tomorrow morning.” He sees Kyle look up. “I’m off on Saturdays, anyway.” The truth is, Stan has a date with one of Shelly’s friends’ brothers, a guy named Gary who is physically flawless, blond and rosy-cheeked and youthful even at 40.

There are so many misdirections between them that the next doesn’t even faze Stan: “My last nanny quit because of me. You’ll quit, too. They all quit.”

“We’ll see about that.” Stan is thinking both about Gary’s perfect slalom nose and how Kyle wrinkles his up when he says something overly familiar. “You need some glue here, that’s all.”

“Glue?”

“To help bond things together?” Stan meshes his fingers together. “Never mind. I’ll be back later.”

Over a huitlacoche quesadilla at Tacos Auténticos Especial Número Dos on 56th, Stan tells Gary about his time in Spain, and the differences between Spanish and Mexican food. Gary eats it up, fawning, everything “so interesting” or “I never thought about that before, but you’re so right.” Stan has never relished being right, and though he accepts Gary’s invitation to a second date next Saturday,  the entire time he’s thinking of his new job, of little Shiri with her terrified eyes, and of Kyle with his giant dick poster, alone in the house as he struggles to get Shiri into bed. Stan’s done precisely no nannying for them yet, but a small part of his mind is back at that McMansion, in that office. Maybe Kyle doesn’t know it, but Stan’s needed there, he can feel it. It’s a weird romantic feeling. It’s bothering him until Gary makes a comment about “when you have children—”

Stan interrupts: “I don’t want children.”

“But you’re so good with them,” says Gary. “If you work with them all the time!”

“Yeah, but if you do a good job, your own children grow up and they leave you. The best-case scenario is that they stop needing you. Isn’t that grim? If you work with other people’s children, there’s always someone else who needs you. You get to start all over again, all the time. You get to feel that over and over again. That’s the thing I like about kids. I couldn’t do that to children of my own.”

“How interesting!” says Gary. “I guess I never thought about it like that. But it makes sense!”

“I know,” is all Stan can say. He knows he won’t storm out like Kyle’s previous nannies — like Kyle’s wife. He’ll never get tired of being needed. His glue metaphor sells his services; it’s good copy. It works because it’s true. It’s why he tries to work for families that _don’t_ need him. He doesn’t want to get hurt.


	5. 48. boss/intern au

Humiliation after humiliation at this gig already, and Stan comes back from lunch to learn that Kyle’s been promoted over him at the Rocky Mountain Institute for Marine Conservation.  

“I’m sorry!” says Kyle, in his “not even close to sorry” voice. “You shouldn’t have taken a lunch break!”

“Kyle!” Stan is so furious and bewildered that he can’t help but punctuate his sentences so they all come out exclamatory. “I got you lunch!” He holds up a paper sack that contains a bag of baked lays, a Sheila’s Dream Bar, and A Wreck sandwich with mayo, oil, seasonings, lettuce, tomatoes, and pickle. It’s Kyle’s go-to Potbelly order and Stan would never forget it in any situation, for any reason. The details of the Wreck sandwich toppings of Kyle’s preference are etched into Stan’s brain much the same as Stan knows Kyle’s Social Security number (in case he passes out from hypoglycemia and Stan needs to fill out his ER paperwork) or that Kyle likes to come with two fingers in his ass, after Stan has already finished, pressing gently but with certainty against his prostate. Stan first brought Kyle back a Dream Bar on their first day of this internship, because that’s Kyle’s mom’s name; he acted like this was insulting but now it’s his go-to dessert. Stan gets a coffee milkshake and he’s holding it in a shaking fist, not sure whether to laugh or to cry.

“I don’t know what happened,” says Kyle. “I guess Ralph quit, and then Marilyn came over because they need someone to step in and supervise, and I was the only one sitting here.”

“Why didn’t you say something like, you guys, my boyfriend’s getting us lunch, don’t promote anyone until he gets back?”

“Because that’s how you get ahead in this business, Stan—you take opportunities when they present themselves. Anyway, I guess I’m your boss now?” Kyle snatches the sack out of Stan’s hand, pulling out the sandwiches. “Which is mine?”

“I don’t know,” says Stan, “open them and find out.” He collapses back in his chair and puts on his headphones, staring blankly at his computer screen. Before he went out he’d been working on making a spreadsheet concerning the lifespan of beluga whales born in captivity since 1990. The grim data stares back at him, mocking his efforts to help anyone or anything. You go out to get your boyfriend a sandwich for 15 minutes and when you come back he’s suddenly the head of your whole department and is standing over you eating a Sheila’s Dream Bar and getting crumbs on your keyboard.

“I guess this is yours.” Kyle puts a smashed sandwich down in front of Stan. It’s a meatball sub and red sauce has soaked through to the outer wrapper.

“Thanks.” Stan pokes at it with a pen, trying to soothe himself with the thought that maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe Kyle can get Stan a promotion, too. Maybe they can both end this internship with full-time paid positions. How bad could this even be?

Kyle interrupts Stan’s train of thought:  “So I didn’t want to say anything, but I think you’d better get back to work.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s just, now I’m responsible for making sure we get this done.” Kyle sits back in his chair, which is directly adjacent to Stan’s; they have, in fact, been sharing a cubicle, their desks forming a right angle around which they’d been regularly playing footsie and talking about whether or not Ralph and Marilyn are doing it. When no one’s around they’ve quietly discussed whether hiring two unpaid post-grad interns for the fall is even legal, but with no other employment opportunities presented to either of them since their graduation from Boulder in May, free grunt work for the RMIMC is the best current option. Plus they’re a nonprofit, and they help dolphins and whales, and they have a basket of free candy bars in the breakroom, so is it really all bad?

Stan didn’t think so, until Kyle told him to get back to work 30 seconds ago.

“This is such bullshit,” Stan whines, putting on his headphones. And it’s true; this is unfair on myriad levels. Of the two of them, Stan is the one who cares about marine life; Kyle doesn’t even cut up his six-pack soda rings. Stan is the one who first reached out to Marilyn to ask what kind of help the Institute needed; Stan is the one who told Kyle they were looking for two interns, so that Kyle could apply. It’s not that Kyle hasn’t taken the job seriously, because he has; Kyle throws himself into everything with too much gusto — that’s probably the problem. He’s spent the past month telling everyone they meet when they go out about the plight of sea animals swallowing microscopic plastic bits that can’t be gathered in a net. But Stan also worries that maybe this means Kyle isn’t concerned enough, honestly, because Stan can’t even think about porpoises swallowing plastic without losing it and having to run to the bathroom to dig out his inhaler. Not that thinking about animals suffering gives him asthma attacks, but it’s a similar feeling in some way and taking deep breaths helps him calm down. In the breakroom there are also pictures of animals covered in oil slick under the computer print-out banner NEVER FORGET and in all honestly Stan can’t even go in there so if he wants a candy bar he’s got to ask Kyle to get it for him.

A Snickers would actually go great with this meatball sandwich and coffee milkshake, but now that Kyle is in charge Stan fears asking him to do anything.

The afternoon passes so slowly, with Kyle called into a meeting with Marilyn at 3. When he’s gone Stan starts Gchatting pretty much everyone, primarily Wendy, about how lame the whole situation is.

“It’s not even that Kyle doesn’t deserve it or I’m not happy for him,” Stan writes, though Kyle doesn’t deserve it and Stan’s not happy for him. “It’s that this is so similar to the pattern that’s been going on since we were kids.”

“Uh huh,” Wendy writes back. She stayed in Boston after college and is applying to law schools there for next fall. In the meantime she is working in Ed Markey’s office, coordinating breakfast meet-and-greets or something; Stan wasn’t really listening when she was home for a week in June. But something like that, something impressive. Or the post-college version of impressive that involves a lot of free breakfast.

“Like do you remember how I practiced my ass off for the eighth grade musical and Kyle didn’t even PREPARE a song for the auditions, like he just decided to audition and somehow ended up with like, the second male lead???”

“But you got the first male lead,” Wendy types.

“But the principle of the thing is that I really cared about the musical and Kyle didn’t!”

“He’s not a good singer,” Wendy writes, “he can’t dance.”

“I know, he sucks at that stuff! So why did he get the second male lead?”

“Some people are just super lucky and successful at everything and maybe Kyle is one of those people,” Wendy writes back.

“You’re one of those people too,” Stan tells her.

“Okay, so people like me and Kyle work really hard.”

“I work hard too!”

“Stan,” she writes, “you’re on Gchat in the middle of the work day.”

“So are you!!!”

“It’s 2 hours later here, I’m done with work.”

Stan types “GAHHHHHHHHH” and closes Gmail. To hell with it.

Biking home as usual, Stan pedals as fast as he can. Kyle’s a slow biker and Stan isn’t, so leaving Kyle to finish the ride himself while Stan sits on the steps of their building after locking up his bike and stews as something of a small punishment. When Kyle does arrive he’s winded and sweaty and there are huge wet stops under his pits. He pulls off his T-shirt and sits on the steps with Stan bare-chested and hyperventilating.

“Don’t ride so hard,” Kyle chides between breaths. “I can’t keep up when you’re going that fast.”

“Well, the feeling is mutual.” Stan is so proud of this jab that he’s taken off guard when Kyle slumps against him, sweaty red hair against the base of Stan’s neck and the collar of his T-shirt.

“The pay is not good,” Kyle promises, “it’s seven bucks an hour.”

“I’m not sure that’s right, isn’t that below minimum wage?”

“I don’t know if minimum wage applies to nonprofits. I don’t know. Maybe my dad would know. I don’t know. What are you making me for dinner?”

It’s not hot out but it’s warm, in the low 70s, at the end of this slow-dwindling summer. “I don’t care about dinner,” says Stan, who only ate half of his sub at lunch, “but I was going to make buttermilk soup.”

“Chilled soup for dinner?”

“Before it’s fall for serious and the weather gets cold, yeah.”

Kyle’s quiet for a moment and he takes his head off of Stan’s shoulder. “Do you want me to help chop vegetables?”

“You don’t have to,” Stan says, “if you’re too important to do kitchen labor.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Kyle rolls down his pant leg and gets up to go lock his bike to the fence. When he’s done, he pockets his keys and offers Stan an open hand. “Come on,” he says. “I need you to feed me.”

Stan stares up at Kyle with a mingling of resentment and sad-sack devotion, admiring the familiar expanse of Kyle’s naked, hairless chest, his soft stomach with a trail of golden hair running up toward the navel, the way Kyle bites his lip and says, “Seriously, I wanna help.”

Accepting Kyle’s grip Stan is hoisted up and he brushes off the seat of his pants. “Don’t forget your shirt,” he says, grabbing Kyle’s messenger bag. “I maintain a strict code of cleanliness in my kitchen.”

“No you don’t,” Kyle says, pulling his T back on. He runs up the stairs after Stan.


	6. 24. literally bumping into each other au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kyle regrets giving his Saturday over to the company picnic -- if only he weren't an associate at his father's firm. Cool pic by Nhaingen!

Every year Kyle swears he’ll talk his father out of doing this, and every year there’s a reason he can’t. No one wants to go down to Cheesman Park and hobble around with their legs tied together and toss water balloons at each other or play musical chairs while Donna from HR plays the banjo. Around the table in the breakroom the other associates pester Kyle: “He’s your dad, you talk to him, someone needs to tell that guy no one wants to give up his Saturday to goof around with a bunch of senior partners in pink polos and plaid shorts.” Kyle agrees, but the bottom line is, Gerald Broflovski doesn’t want anyone telling him how to run his law firm, and if Kyle weren’t hated already, trying to throw his weight around as the boss’ kid is probably the last way to reverse that trend. So he talks himself out of it: three years ago, there was the great family crisis of Kyle’s younger brother leaving medical school to hike for six months in New Zealand. The year after, it was his father’s 60th birthday, and it would have been cruel to burst his bubble. Last year Kyle was up for a promotion, and it was silly to rock the boat. He didn’t get it anyway, it went to some hotshot on the other side of the office, so Kyle’s spent the past year regretting that he didn’t do it. Now the office picnic is upon them again, and again Kyle refuses to bow to peer pressure.

“I can’t just tell my dad to cancel the picnic,” Kyle tells everyone over lunch. “He’s been looking forward to it for weeks. All year, really. It wouldn’t be fair to him.” Frankly, Kyle thinks what’s not fair is that he didn’t make partner again this year, so maybe he shouldn’t worry about hurting his father’s feelings. Then again, he did feel guilty when his dad sat him down and said, “Kyle, you’re my son, I can’t just give you a partnership. People will think I’m playing favorites.” So maybe Kyle shouldn’t care if his father’s feelings are hurt, but, he does.

He wishes he didn’t. He sits through lunch the Friday before the picnic – it’s a tradition he shares with a handful of other young-ish associates – and dreams about just not showing up at all. There’s Wendy, who’s just made partner, and she’s buying everyone a round of cocktails to celebrate. There’s Token, who works hard but isn’t quite so driven, his father a big-shot at a rival firm; Token has a trust fund and he’s not afraid to withdraw from it, given the sharp cuts of his suits and the BMW he drives around with the top down. There’s Bebe, who’s actually a secretary, not a lawyer, though she’s sharp and puts away more than any of them. And there’s Craig, who barely says anything and leaves promptly every day at 5. Kyle wishes these people wouldn’t pressure him, but they do, and the most maddening aspect of the whole ordeal is that Kyle doesn’t want to go to the picnic, either, and maybe these guys should realize that it’s actually worse being the boss’ son because you have to work extra hard and do even more you don’t want to do. Kyle is trying to explain this over a gin and Sprite but no one’s listening.

“I was going to go with Clyde to see his dad’s new condo,” Bebe explains. Her boyfriend Clyde is a complete dildo, as far as Kyle’s concerned; he works at the consulting firm they share a floor with, and one time his tie got stuck in the elevator door and Bebe paced the hallway while everyone gawked and waited for security to come get him out.

“Did you really want to do that, though?” Wendy asks. She’s looking at her phone, constantly. Doing work, she says. Kyle believes her. She’s eating a Cobb salad.

“Every time we go anywhere he hints that he might propose, finally.”

“Okay, but every time you go anywhere he doesn’t,” Wendy argues. “Plus, do you really want to marry that loser? He got his tie stuck in an elevator, Bebe.”

“That could happen to anyone!”

Craig interjects. “Now, hold up. That was the greatest thing to ever happen at this firm. The single greatest thing.”

“Well, it didn’t even happen at the firm,” Token says, “it happened in the hallway.”

“And isn’t that just telling?” Craig slowly, painfully eats the hand-cut kettle chips that came with his veggie burger.

Kyle sighs and wishes he were still in college, when he was enough of a lightweight to actually get drunk off a gin and Sprite. Getting blasted at lunch is something his father wouldn’t approve of, but also wouldn’t notice. They all expense their meals and split a cab back to the office, where Clyde is waiting in the lobby to whine to Bebe about how he got mustard on his jeans.

“Oh my god,” Wendy sighs, pushing through the doors that lead away from reception. “Will this week never end?”

“It’s like, nearly 2,” Kyle says, following her.

“Yeah, but I basically have to go to work tomorrow, too.” She slides her phone back into the back picket of her jeans and rolls her sleeves back down. She probably left her blazer on the back of her chair. “At least you can kill two birds with one stone,” she says, shaking her head at Kyle. “Bebe’s not the only one who had plans. I’m missing my kickball game for this.”

“Well, I guess we could play kickball at the picnic?”

“It’s not the point,” Wendy bitches. “It’s the Denver Womyn’s League semi-finals. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just one of those things.”

“One of what things?”

“You know,” she says, “just frustrating.”

Kyle’s about to say to her, “Well, good luck, see you tomorrow,” and go back to his office and dive back into his work; his specialty is personal bankruptcy, and it’s hugely demeaning, so he’d love to get a bunch done and not think about it until Monday. But then some guy walks by and says, “Hey, Wends,” and Kyle immediately has to curl up into a ball and die because it’s that guy he hates.

“Hey,” she says back, waving at him.

“Wendy,” Kyle says, “that’s the douche who took my partnership!”

“I know,” she says. “I mean, he didn’t take it, he earned it, and he’s actually a cool guy, and he’s got a name and it’s Stan.”

“Whatever.” Kyle pretends not to hear anything she’s saying because it’s all information he’d prefer to die without, and on top of everything it’s just insulting that said douche is so attractive it’s appalling, with black hair that peeks out of his shirt where the top three buttons are undone and lips that make Kyle want to run to his dad’s office and lock himself in the private bathroom for 10 minutes. “Are you saying if I got a partnership I would, by default, not have earned it because of favoritism?”

“Look,” says Wendy, in her “see here” tone, “I’m not saying that, I’m just saying, your name is on the door.”

“It is not,” Kyle wants to say, but then he realizes, yes it is: Broflovski and Partners. It’s in a horrible font – who puts Lucida Sans on letterhead? – but it is, which is a shame, because it forces Kyle to mumble, “Yeah, yeah,” and awkwardly shuffle away.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Wendy calls after him, but Kyle was born embarrassed. He spends his evening casually flipping through bicurious profiles on Grindr and eating leftover Szechuan from Wednesday. It’s the ultimate self-pitying Friday night, but he has to be at Cheesman Park at 2 the next day, which leaves him with no time to be productive. He imagines Wendy at home, doing yoga while she clears out all the episodes of Vice from her DVR and steams all of her ass-flattering athletic shorts for tomorrow’s activities. Kyle has no flattering anything because shopping would require him to look at himself in a mirror, so he puts together an outfit for tomorrow of mesh basketball shorts leftover from high school gym class – which makes them 15 years old, probably – and a long-sleeved henley that he used to find flattering when it was initially purchased in his law school slutty period. Then again, that was back when he shopped at American Apparel. All the time, picking out an outfit the night before makes him feel incredibly responsible and forward-thinking, so he sleeps easy until his neighbors start going at it around 7 in the morning. The walls in Kyle’s building are way too thin.

The worst aspect of the picnic every year, without fail, other than the food (which is cheap because the HR people who organize it are monsters) and the forced camaraderie and having to give up half of a weekend, is that it’s a spousal/significant other affair. Kyle doesn’t have one of those, but his dad does, and unfortunately it’s Kyle’s mother. She gives him a lecture when he gets there about how he looks fat and also “like a hobo,” because he’s wearing flip-flops.

“These are forty-five dollar flip-flops,” Kyle argues. The pumpkin latte he’s holding has gone cold as he’s standing nearly barefoot in wet grass on the receiving end of a lecture from his mother.

“So?” she asks. “What’s it matter? They’re not appropriate, Kyle, they’re shower shoes. How are you making your father look–”

Kyle turns to see his father wearing a bucket hat with the company’s grim logo embroidered on it and a whistle around his neck.

“Sorry,” Kyle says, “next time I’ll think about that before I pick out what I’m going to wear.”

Helping himself to some limp catering sandwich halves, Kyle lets Wendy talk his ear off about how her kickball team, the Lincoln Park Labrys, is winning in the fourth inning and Wendy’s completely missing it. Kyle is so disinterested in playing any of the games that he pretends to give a shit about Wendy’s kickball league and asks many questions about what positions she’s played and, at risk of getting into subject matter with which he’s not comfortable, which of her teammates she’s slept with.

“None of them,” she replies, “and it’s awfully rude of you to ask.” Kyle hopes this will have his intended effect of getting a lecture, but instead Wendy begs off to actually participate in the water balloon toss. As she walks away Kyle admires and envies the way her ass looks like a water balloon itself, taught and full and just begging to be grabbed. The thought of molesting poor Wendy is so unnerving that Kyle turns around in a daze and, of course, somehow manages to bump into a person.

“Oh my god,” Kyle says, “I’m so sorry,” though he isn’t as soon as he backs up and sees that douchey partner, Stan, in front of him, rubbing his nose and holding a half-drunk lemonade with a little paper umbrella in it.

“It’s okay,” Stan says, trying to shake it off. “That could have happened to anyone. Anyone might’ve been checking out Wendy’s ass and then turned around and bumped into me.”

“I was not,” says Kyle.

“I dunno, the way you’re blushing says otherwise.”

“Listen,” Kyle begins, about to excuse himself.

“If you’re really sorry you’ll do the three-legged race with me.”

“Excuse me, what?”

“I was just coming over here to ask Wendy if she wanted to do the three-legged race, but she walked away, and then you walked into me, so, you want to do it?”

It would be nearly impossible for Kyle to say no if Stan was asking Kyle if “you want to do it” meaning run back to Kyle’s car and dispense with the formalities and skip to anal penetration, which Kyle is literally always game for. Instead, he just kind of looks Stan up and down and tries to figure out if he would enjoy being nonsexually tied to him by the ankle. Stan is wearing jeans rolled up to mid-calf and a vintage-looking Denver Broncos T-shirt with the old logo, the one with a goofy horse in a capital D. Stan takes a sip of his lemonade and presses his lips together like he’s caught in deep thought, though it’s Kyle who’s forced to make a decision.

“I mean, so long as I’m spending my Saturday at this thing, the least I could do is participate.”

“What do I get if we win?” Kyle asks.

“We won’t win,” says Stan.

“I’m a lawyer. I don’t do anything I don’t intend to win.”

Stan grins at this and empties his lemonade cup. “Then let’s go practice,” he suggests.

“Practice nothing,” Kyle says, “these events are for kids. I went to summer camp, I got this.”

“Well, okay.” Stan seems incredulous, but he acquiesces.

As they head for the event, Kyle worries that perhaps Stan is just letting him get away with things because he’s the boss’ son and so on and so forth. But Kyle puts it out of mind because he’s tired of it. He hates the self-doubting, he hates having to second-guess whether he’s actually competent or if people just invite him to lunch because they’re trying, indirectly, to suck up to Kyle’s dad. Surely it’s a mix of a few things, some real integrity mingled with sucking up, but Kyle forgets about his ongoing self-doubt as soon as he feels Stan’s ankle knock against his own while Bebe fastens them together.

Sadly, Kyle has neglected to consider his odds of faring well in a three-legged race while he also has a giant boner.

So Stan and Kyle collapse into a giant pile, a mess of limbs and overpriced leather J. Crew men’s flip-flops, Stan laughing like it’s all jolly good fun and Kyle hissing in pain while his dick leaks into his boxer-briefs.

Clyde, who managed to finish the race tied to Token, comes over to help make things a million times worse by showing Kyle the Broflovski and Partners pin he got as a prize. “Pretty cool, huh? I thought you guys were gonna win for sure, but then – wow! You just – fell over!”

“I guess.” It takes all of Kyle’s good manners to keep himself from pulling up a handful of grass and throwing it in Clyde’s smug face.

“It’s okay.” Stan is untying the rope and Kyle watches his long fingers confidently work. “We’ll just get up here.” He helps Kyle hobble back over to the food and drink, where he gets a napkin and fills it with ice. “We can put this on your ankle.”

“Okay.” At this point Kyle s barely processing anything, just going along with stuff in a daze. Stan helps him toward a bench where Kyle thinks they’re going to sit, but when they’re well away from the picnic Stan says “hold on” and abruptly lifts Kyle into his arms. Shrieking, Kyle nearly drops his packet of ice.

“What are you doing?” he asks. “What if this, are you kidnapping me?”

“Of a sort.”

“My dad’s gonna be so pissed if you murder me,” says Kyle. “He’s gonna regret giving you that partnership for sure.”

“I don’t know,” Stan says, “I’m kind of an asset to this firm.”

They wind up on the other side of the park, where Stan sets Kyle down next to a tree and, dispensing with so much as the slimmest margin of propriety, kisses him straight on the mouth as soon as the ice is on Kyle’s ankle.

“What are you doing?” Kyle asks, by which he hopes it’s clear that he means, “Keep doing that.”

“What you want me to do, judging by the evidence?” He nods toward Kyle’s crotch. “It’s obvious, dude, sorry. You’re wearing mesh shorts.”

“Don’t ‘dude’ me,” Kyle says, though it’s actually kind of hot, in the same way that bicurious profiles on Grindr are hot – extremely, by Kyle’s reckoning.

“Do you use Grindr?” Kyle asks, wondering who else from the office would show up if he picked up his phone right now.

“I use Tinder,” Stan says, “though Wendy’s been trying to talk me into asking you out for three months, which is more effective, since she’s an insistent little dictator about it. Can you forgive me for getting your partnership? I’ll make it up to you?”

“Oh really?” Kyle asks. “How?”

The answer he gets from Stan is thoroughly inappropriate for the company picnic.


	7. 44. pretending to hate each other au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a 1930s British schoolboy AU written right after I watched _Another Country_ , which I highly recommend if you like period dramas and don't mind a slow-going, cautious style.

First glimpses were maddening because they had to remain glimpses, else Stanley risk breaking formation. This time he received a glance back: amber eyes, some auburn hair visible under that starched cap, pale skin with ruddy cheeks. When the boy looked away Stan saw the hawkish outline of his nose and, in a wave of nausea, realized he was in love.

After the parade on the walk back to the dorms, Stan made a point of asking, “Say, did you see that chap down the row — with the reddish hair? I didn’t catch his name.”

Kenny pulled off his cap and shook out his blond hair. “I think it’s Broflovski. He’s new, I think.”

“Right. But where’s he come from? What do you know?”

“I don’t know everything,” Kenny sniffed. It was a lie; he did so. “Anyway, that’s that. His name’s Broflovski and he’s new.”

For a week Stanley brooded on what to do about his infatuation. He sulked through lectures, hummed to himself pressing his trousers, was kind to the juniors and kept giving them coins to go buy ice cream. It didn’t talk long for Kenny to ask, one evening as they got ready for bed, “What is it with you?”

“I’m in love,” Stan confessed.

“What, again?”

“Again? I’ve never been in love — no, for the first time.”

“That business with Tucker didn’t count?”

“Tucker turned tail and fled the moment I began to suspect he liked it.”

“And Harrison?”

“That weird sect of his — completely innocent. I’m not altogether certain he realized what we were doing was a sin.”

“But you’ve never been in love before?”

“I wish I could say I had. That might make it easier.”

“Well, thank god for fresh meat. Here I thought there was no one at this school you hadn’t fallen in love with.”

“Everyone but you, McCormick. You’re incorruptible.”

“It’s my fixation on girls that keeps me honest.”

“Oh?” Stan asked. “Have you taken a fancy to some girl?”

“I’d sooner fancy myself as one, but it’s just as well.” Kenny smiled. “Don’t muck it up with this one, Marsh. You don’t want to scare them away before they’ve even finished the term.”

Some confidence bubbled up in Stan and he said, “Oh, I won’t. I’ve got a hunch about this one.”

It took a second week of moony distraction and an especially simmering glare against the cricket pitch to set Stan into motion. He jotted a note: _Join me at the boathouse Sunday evening, 10 pm. S Marsh_. After his English lecture he handed it to a junior. “You know Broflovski? He’s the new guy.”

“I think so.”

“Take this to him.”

“Yes, sir!”

Stan was confident his note wouldn’t be read in transit, thanks to a precarious application of sealing wax. The juniors were especially trepidatious so early in their careers; Stanley himself had been, though the longer he was at the school the less the officious prefects minded him. For boys of extraordinary power, they were weak-willed and forgiving to their friends. If Stan had been intimate with some of them on occasion, all the better. Sometimes it seemed as though Tucker enjoyed those canings, and why wouldn’t he? It was probably his realest chance at physical contact with a boy, however brief. Only Stanley knew Tucker enjoyed being on the receiving end of one, too. If this business with the new boy took a turn, Stan told himself, he could always employ that knowledge in a friendly bit of blackmail.

Every old boy knew public school was rife with vice. Asking for a caning, though — that was something else.

* * *

Around 10 at the boathouse, Stanley’s only option was to wait. He hadn’t brought a book, as it would have complicated both his escape from the dormitories and his return, which was managed with the help of a drainpipe adjacent to the reading room window. The stone wall by the pipe was shiny, worn with years of boys’ descents in the dead of night. The penalty if caught would have been severe, but no one had ever been caught; the mischief was almost expected. Being late to rise in the morning would have been less forgivable.

Stanley sat on a stack of punt cushions and waited for so long that he was unsure if Broflovski was coming at all. The looks over lessons suggested he wanted this meeting as much as Stan did, but sometimes new boys failed to realize it was possible to break the rules and get away with it. Moreover, some boys simply enjoyed following the rules. Stotch was one of these; it had become a sort of game, amongst other boys in their year, to lead the poor bastard astray. Stan hoped Broflovski wasn’t like that, a natural rule-follower. He had shocking, untamed ginger hair that seemingly couldn’t be combed, which was just as Stanley liked it. It was so unruly Stanley would have gotten his fingers stuck in it, and it probably smelled faintly of antiseptic and sweat, maybe wet grass if he’d been to cricket that day. All the boys’ hair smelled the same here.

Every time Stan heard a creak or a groan he anticipated Broflovski’s arrival, and he was in fact telling himself to give up hope when the door cracked open and moonlight spilled it. A little voice asked, “Hello?” It was the first time Stanley had heard his voice.

“Broflovski?” Stan sked, getting up off the stack of punt cushions on which he’d been waiting.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m me, it’s here. I mean—”

“I’m so relieved,” said Stanley, reaching out to take Broflovski by the shoulder. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

“I wasn’t sure how to get here. I’ve never been to the boathouse.” His voice had a soft lick of something else in it — an eastern accent, maybe, not to heavy. It sounded clipped and educated.

“Well, it’s much better in the daylight,” Stanley said. “I don’t dare turn the light on. In my experience they’re happy to look away, so long as you aren’t sloppy.”

“Who are they?”

“Oh, you know. Everyone.”

“Could we go outside?” Broflovski asked. “I want to see your face.”

Out of doors it was still dark but there was minor visibility. “I’ll get a pad,” Stanley said, and he fetched one of the cushions on which he’d been sitting. He dragged it out toward the dock, letting Broflovski follow. They hardly knew each other — it was so unlike his meetings with everyone else, furtive and without any formality. This felt a bit like courting. Stanley offered an arm and Broflovski took it, and led him out to the end of the dock where they sat together, saying little, their thighs touching through their trousers. Stanley rolled his cuffs up, took off his shoes and stockings; it felt more intimate.

“My name is Stanley,” he said, “but they call me Stan.”

“Stan.” Broflovski said it as if he were savoring it. “I’m Kyle.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, formally.”

“I thought we were being informal,” Kyle said, and he laughed softly.

“You’re not from England, are you?”

Kyle shook his head. “My mother is English, but we’ve just come from Russia.”

“Russia? Have you met McCormick, he’s a socialist — he’d flee there if he only could.”

“I don’t know him, but how silly — I’d tell him not to bother. You’ll have a social revolution in this country before the Russians take in anyone who wants to be there. They’re awful to Jews, for instance. That’s why we left.”

“Do you miss it?” Stan asked.

“I suppose. This place is something of a distraction. … Perhaps you’re something of a distraction.”

“Would you like me to be one?”

“That would make this whole thing go down a bit easier, I think.” Kyle grinned widely. When Stan offered Kyle a hand he took it, leaning in to rest his head against Stan’s shoulder. “But it couldn’t be a sustained thing, could it? I don’t exactly want a caning?”

Stanley thought for a moment. “It would be best not to call attention to ourselves,” he said. “If it appears we’ve grown fond of each other, it’ll look suspicious. Most people will look away from a one-off, everyone’s had one or two. But a longer-term affair would raise flags. It might imply we actually liked it.”

“I often wonder if the people around here actually like anything.”

“I think some people get off on the whole system, though,” Stan replied, thinking mostly of Tucker. “Anyway, I think perhaps it’s best if we act as though we dislike each other. Then we can continue meeting here, at the boathouse.”

“How often?” Kyle asked. “Just at nights?”

“It’s the safest thing,” said Stanley. “Perhaps once a week, so it doesn’t take its toll.”

Stanley knew it was partly the frequency of their delinquency that caught up some boys, leading to trouble. The school hated to dismiss its students; too many expulsions told of an issue with the institution itself. In order to stay neat and tidy Stanley never gave in to his desire to invite Kyle to further meetings, but he found it difficult to feign hatred for him in public. It was much more fun to shoot Kyle knowing glances across rooms, to brush against him subtly in crowded passageways. He tried to muster the will to be cruel to Kyle, though nothing ill came to mind when he wished to be insulting.

“Are you still hung-up on Broflovski?” McCormick asked one day, as he was trying to do his work out in the yard.

“Why do you even bring him up?” Stan asked, kicking at some wildflowers. He was having a difficult time focusing on his Catullus.

“You were in love with him not too long ago,” McCormick said, “so what happened?”

“He’s despicable,” Stanley said, trying not to focus on the way Kyle’s pulse points tasted lose rosewater, and how he shuddered when Stan reached into his trousers. “Don’t even talk to me about him. I can’t stand that miserable boy.”

“Something must have gone badly, because I heard from Donovan that he feels that same about you.”

“He feels the same about me?”

“Yeah,” said McCormick, “he told Donovan he’d die if you made prefect next year, that he’d consider leaving, even.”

“Well, I’m going to make prefect, so good riddance. Donovan said that? They were talking? And since when do you speak to Donovan?”

“He’s good for a laugh, the fool. Anyway, you must have done a number on this boy. He said he was traumatized.”

“He’s an immigrant,” Stanley said, “he barely speaks English. Farewell to him.”

Yet a small part of Stanley was reeling still: what if he doesn’t like me? What if he did leave?

Down the line at that week’s inspection, Stanley turned to try to catch Kyle’s eyes for a moment, but Kyle stood straight and regimented, looking ahead, not turning toward Stan at all. There were days until their next meeting at the boathouse, and Stan hated how it felt like years between those meetings, like galaxies. There was talk amongst the boys that they hated each other, but when Stanley sat down to write Kyle little notes, all he could come up with was, “I love you. You’re my best friend.” A best friend who wouldn’t — couldn’t — even spare him a glance. And Stanley couldn’t afford to keep sending him notes, anyway. He was running out of change.

At their next meeting, Stan practically felt into Kyle’s arms and wept, his voice muffled in the knit of Kyle’s sweater.

“I can’t take it for much longer,” Stanley said. “You’re too good at this, how do you do it?”

“I suppose I just think of the reward,” Kyle said, stroking Stanley’s hair. “These late evenings, they get me through it.”

“It isn’t fair,” Stanley moaned, “that anyone would look away from a quick grope in the shower, but you’re my best friend, maybe my only friend here—”

“What about McCormick?”

“Oh, he’s all right, but he’s ridiculous himself, and he thinks I’m a bit absurd. He doesn’t think it’s real, or that it’s lasting. If he really knew me he wouldn’t have bought my dismissal of you, my little act.”

“You are a horrible actor,” Kyle said, and he pressed a kiss on Stan’s ear. “That’s how I know you really love me. You couldn’t feign it if you tried.”

“Just tell me it’s worth it.”

“Oh, I think it is. If we stopped this, I’d miss it.”

“How much?” Stan asked.

“More than I miss home.” Kyle paused. “This is my home now.”

“This boathouse?”

“Well, yes,” said Kyle. “Meaning us.”

Stanley couldn’t help but grin at that. It was his most favorite thing he’d ever heard.


	8. 15. meeting in the ER/A&E au

Around 1 in the morning Wendy finds Stan at the nurses' station. It's Saturday night, she's frazzled, and technically Stan is on his break and he's eating a Luna Bar Protein, cherry-almond flavor, and trying to make it through the weekend. "There's a guy here," she says, "and he demands a male nurse."  
  
Stan looks up, still chewing his dinner, only halfway through this 12-hour shift. Tonight was his 10-year high school reunion and he's missing it, sitting on a stool under the florescent lights of the St. Anthony ER. "Can anyone else do it?" he asks. Typically he'd do anything for Wendy, but he gets one 30-minute break and then he'll be on his feet until 7 a.m.  
  
"Everyone else is busy," she says, fanning herself with manila folders, her hair falling out of a butterfly clip.  
  
"Yeah, that's because I'm on a break." He takes another bite of his protein bar.  
  
"Look, this guy, he really needs help."  
  
Stan swallows. "Yeah, that's because this is an emergency room."  
  
She hits him with her stack of folders. "Yeah, I know! But, look, this poor guy, I think he really needs to calm down, his blood pressure's through the roof and he really wants a male nurse."  
  
"All right, all right." Stan trashes the protein bar wrapper and grabs his stethoscope and a pair of rubber gloves. "You know, I haven't slept in like -- a long time."  
  
"So? Join the club, Stan. Welcome to healthcare in America in 2015."  
  
"Yes, I know, I get it," Stan says, shuffling off with her down the hall. "Where can I find this gentleman?"  
  
"I stuck him in 5B," Wendy says. "Thanks for dealing with this. I gotta -- we need to start moving people out of here, before the stupid teenager alcohol poisoning rush."  
  
"Is that before or after the gun violence rush?"  
  
"Well, that's the problem, they're usually at the same time." She puts a hand on his shoulder. "Thanks. I mean it. I know how important it is for people to get a break."  
  
"Yeah, yeah." Stan turns away and heads toward 5B. He wanted that break, but Wendy runs a tight ship. He wouldn't disappoint her.  
  
In 5B -- just a corner of the department partitioned with a curtain -- he finds a man standing over the examining table, leaning against it with his arms crossed and a look of mild discomfort on his face. He's still clothed from head-to-toe in streetwear, and to get his attention, Stan says, "Has anyone directed you to change?" There's a hospital gown on a chair.  
  
The man turns and Stan is surprised to see that he has a youthful face which is crossed with an expression of some embarrassment which ages him, slightly. He has sharp features, close-cropped hair on the sides that's longer in front, and he says, "Thank god," shaking his head. "They finally sent the right person." He's a redhead. Stan's always been curious about redheads. "Do I really have to change?"  
  
"Well, it's sort of what we do here." Stan picks up the gown and sits on the stool. Wendy's left his chart on the counter. Stan picks it up, flipping through. The patient's name is Kyle Broflovski, he's only slightly younger than Stan -- they would have been in the same year at school -- and he's a diabetic with hypertension who has a dildo stuck up his ass.  
  
Stan sets the chart down; he is very good about not making patients feel ridiculous, and he has certainly pulled a number of odd forms from every kind of place -- marbles from kids' noses, Barbie shoes from ears, condoms from women's vaginas, and so on. This is the first man who's ever come up with something stuck up his ass, let alone something that was meant to go up there. The weirdest ER stories are the ones where something insane -- a Golden Globes statuette, a garlic press, a spool of typewriter correction tape -- gets lost in someone's body.  
  
"Well," Stan says, closing the chart and putting it back on the counter, "at least you've stuck the right thing up the right hole. It could be a lot worse. What happened?"  
  
"What do you think happened?" Kyle asks. "I was trying to pleasure myself rectally and I used too much lube, lost my grip."  
  
"You should use one with a flared base." Stan tosses the gown onto the table. "You have to put this on."  
  
"Do I really?"  
  
"Well, yes, if you want me to get that out for you."  
  
"Of course I want you to get it out! I just figured I could maybe pull my pants down a little."  
  
"Put the gown on," Stan says, "and I'll be back."  
  
"Jesus, don't leave me," Kyle says, but Stan has to. He heads back to the nurse's station, where Wendy is filling out paperwork.  
  
"Is there a doctor around? Or a PA?"  
  
"Why?" she asks, looking up. "Is this about 5B?"  
  
"Yeah," says Stan, "he needs a scrip."  
  
"For what?"  
  
"Probably klonopin. Maybe a muscle relaxant."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Why? Wendy, he's got a dildo stuck up his ass and I have to extract it."  
  
She starts laughing, covering her mouth. "Sorry, sorry," she says. "What?"  
  
"Oh, yes, it's very funny, interrupt me while I'm eating dinner and send me to go deal with the dildo guy, ha ha, everyone have a good laugh about it, send Stan the gay nurse to get a fucking dildo out of some dude's ass."  
  
"I didn't know he had a dildo in his ass!" she follows Stan down the hall to the dispensary. "Bebe just told me he was demanding a male nurse!"  
  
"Well, no kidding, poor guy, he's freaked out." Stan pulls a bottle of Xanax off the shelf and shakes out a 0.25. "This should help him out, right?"  
  
“I would never imply that just because you’re gay you’d know anything about dildos.”  
  
“You owe me a protein bar.” Stan heads back to the little partition, where Kyle is now standing in the same position in a hospital gown instead of his street clothes. The blue-green color is terrible for him and the way the drapey fabric falls does little for his figure. He’s breathing deeply, and Stan hands him the Xanax and the glass of water. “Can you stand up straight to take this?”  
  
“I might, but it’ll feel kind of weird,” Kyle admits.  
  
“How big do we think this dildo is?”  
  
“In inches? It’s pretty long.”  
  
“Can you estimate?”  
  
“Fuck, I don’t know.” Tears are coming to his eyes. “Why is this what I’m doing?”  
  
“Hey,” Stan says. “It’s actually normal, okay? There’s literally nothing weird about wanting to use one of these things. A lot of people use them. I use them.”  
  
“You use them?”  
  
“Well, yeah. On me, on other people. They’re fun. It’s nothing to feel weird about.”  
  
“But I got it stuck in my own butt!”  
  
"Well, now we're going to get it out, okay? It's not a big deal."  
  
As a nurse, Stan tries to have empathy. While he fills out the paperwork and waits for the anti-anxiety drug to take effect, he tries to imagine what it would be like on the other end of the this equation. "I mean, I get it," Stan says, looking over the medical information Kyle's provided a second time. "No one likes going to the ER, and why would they? I don't even like it here, and I'm here voluntarily."  
  
"Isn't this your job?"  
  
"Yeah, but I don't have to be an ER nurse. Anyway, I'm just saying -- if you were here with a broken bone or if you were bleeding because you cut yourself or if you had to get your stomach pumped because you got loaded on grain alcohol before the school dance or whatever, we'd all treat it like it was just a normal fuck-up, even though all of those things are potentially way more serious that this, which is honestly no big deal. Like I bet you're uncomfortable right now, but you're not gonna die from a fake dick in your ass."  
  
"I'm not?" Kyle asks. "Because I feel like I'm dying."  
  
"The human butt can accommodate, um, a lot of things. Believe me." Stan pulls on a pair of gloves.  
  
"Well, at least I'm in the hands of an amateur proctologist who knows what he's talking about."  
  
"No, I'm just a nurse practitioner. But don't tell me you never, like, swiped your dad's copy of _Backdoor Sluts 9_."  
  
"Even if I did I don't think that move was real."  
  
"What do you mean, real?" Stan asks. "Are you not familiar with the porn industry?"  
  
"Just get this thing out of me," Kyle whines.  
  
It's not hard, just a sponge clamp and a little bit of pressure. Kyle screams when it's extracted, but then he slumps over the table and groans with a kind of relief Stan's never heard before, at least not out of an ER patient. It turns out the dildo is pink, sparkly, and rounded, which is nothing like what Stan was anticipating. When he imagined what kind of dildo Kyle would use, he imagined something really lifelife and articulate, or at least as lifelike as dildos get.  
  
After he tosses the dildo, Stan grabs a hemorrhoid pillow so Kyle can sit down. "You did great," he says, rubbing Kyle's shoulder.  
  
Breathing heavily, Kyle says, "Are you kidding? I shrieked like a girl."  
  
"No, you shrieked like a dude with a dildo being pulled out of your ass." Stan stops rubbing Kyle's shoulders. "Do you need a painkiller scrip?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"Well, it probably wouldn't hurt." Stan washes his hands and chats idly: "Look, I can't even begin to tell you about the stuff we pull out of people in here."  
  
"Oh, like what?"  
  
"Well, like I said, I can't tell you, because of HIPAA. But, look, you can't dwell on this. It's out now."  
  
"That dildo wasn't cheap," says Kyle. Now that he's looking up from where he's sitting, Stan admires his pouty lower lip and how messy his hair is.  
  
Stan looks at the clock on the wall. His break is long over, and there are other patients to see. "I'll get that scrip for you," he says, hustling away from Kyle as he blushes at the memory of hunching down below Kyle's ass, of the clamp prying him open -- it's not erotic, really, or romantic; it would be wrong to say that Stan is turned on by extracting foreign bodies from dudes' butts.  
  
But it was intimate, and something about Kyle's weary self-awareness and vulnerability haunts Stan to the point that he scribbles a note on the discharge papers: _Be careful! Remember, sex is healthy and best practiced safely with a friend. -- Stanley_. He finds himself fearing for the rest of his shift that it was a major violation of some code of nursing ethics to include his phone number.

* * *

Kyle never gets over it. He never gets over the idea that he and Stan met in the ER while Kyle had a dildo shoved in his ass. It's six years later and they're standing in Denver city hall making small talk with the clerk who's processing the payment for their marriage license and Kyle still hasn't come to terms with this when he's asked, without preamble, "How'd you guys meet?"  
  
"Work," Stan says, which is perfectly true.  
  
"Stan was a nurse at the ER I went to when I had a dildo stuck in my butt," Kyle says, which no one ever believes.  
  
"Oh, you boys are such a riot!" The clerk slaps the counter; she's probably a Nebraska transplant with her big blond hair and way too much eye makeup. "I've heard so many crazy things today. I just issued a license to a couple-a guys who met because their wives were bridge partners, isn't that a hoot?"  
  
"And a holler," Stan says.  
  
They walk away with their license, each grinning.  
  
"Some people get good stories," Kyle says, clutching Stan's arm. "We could have grown up together. We could have had bridge-partner wives!"  
  
"The dildo thing is a much better story. I don't know that you should be telling it to civic employees, but you can't deny that it's a great story."  
  
"Nobody ever lets me tell the best part of the story, though."  
  
"Yeah?" Stan asks. "What's that -- the hemorrhoid pillow?"  
  
"No," says Kyle. "It's the part where I was out 125 bucks because you threw the dildo away, and you wrote your phone number on my discharge papers, and said, 'I wanna fuck you'-- "  
  
"I don't think that's what I wrote?"  
  
"Something to that effect, and I called you up and and you said, I've got something better than a dildo, and it's free. And you've been putting things in and taking them out of my ass ever since."  
  
"Well," Stan says, "that part's true."


	9. 7. roommates au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a 1990s AU and it got way, way too long. I applied the "roommates" concept somewhat loosely. Art by Nhaingen!

**(6) Stanley’s Candies.** In an art deco storefront on the main street of the quiet little mountain town of South Park sits this candy shop, an homage to vintage soda fountains. Take home a box of raspberry, maple, or mint fondant creams, all of which are made on-site by the owner. Or get a booth and sit in the window, from which the people-watching can’t be beat. Recommended: sour cream doughnuts with sprinkles fresh out of the fryer; lemon ice box pie; pineapple milkshakes. _304 Main Street, South Park, Co. 80441. 303/945-2840. Tues.-Sat. 10-4, Sun. 11-4. $-$$._

* * *

 

Around 10 the mail came, and Kyle picked it up on his way out. Typically on Saturday mornings there were fewer pieces of mail, and that was true today as well, though there was also a package. Instead of taking it upstairs or, as he usually did, stepping over it on the way out the door en route to his mother’s for brunch, Kyle picked up the slim box and, barely containing his excitement, went into the shop. It was just shy of opening, and Kyle made sure to keep the door locked and double-checked that the sign was still turned to “closed” before running into the back.

“It’s here,” he panted, bursting into the kitchen. “It’s finally here!”

Stan was hunched over a tray of dipped pretzels, trying to arrange them just so. He looked up. “Is it really?”

“I think so.” Kyle fumbled in a drawer for a knife and tore the box open. Sure enough, this was it, the thing they’d been waiting on: the 1995 edition of the _Pink Triangle Travel Guide to Denver and the Rocky Mountain Region_. It wasn’t a well-designed book; the black cover had a stock photo of Denver with the title and author’s name centered in Helvetica. Despite the somewhat lacking appearance, Pink Triangle was well-regarded as a top gay-interest series of travel guides. Kyle was amazed that Stan continued arranging pretzels, not budging from his work station. He flipped through the pages, skipping over sections about lesbian bars, annual parades, and bathhouses, finally locating their shop’s listing in a section called DAY TRIPS FROM DENVER. 

“Stanley,” Kyle said, “Stan, come here — we’re a day trip.”

“I’m almost done with these,” Stan said, shaking his head. “It’s time to open, I’m late.”

“I want to Xerox this. I want to put this in the window.”

“Well.” Stan picked up the tray. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

Trailing Stan into the shop, Kyle clutched the guide to his chest. “It’s not fair, honestly. Someone’s bound to find out eventually.”

“Don’t you have to be at your mom’s?”

“She can wait. This is a big deal!”

“Why don’t you show her the guide, then?” Stan peeled the plastic gloves from his hands and balled them up, throwing them into the waste bin by the register.

“That’s not funny,” said Kyle.

“Everyone’s gonna find out eventually, you just said.”

“Honestly,” Kyle repeated, “it’s not fair, honestly.”

“I’m going to give my mother a copy,” said Stan. “Then she’ll know.”

“How did it come to this? I mean, it’s the nineties. What are we doing?”

“We’re opening the shop for the day,” said Stan. “And it’s Saturday, so we’ll get a coffee and pastry rush.” He walked to the front door, turning the sign to open and twisting the lock. “There are some doughnuts in a pink box on the counter next to the mixer in the back if you want to take them over to your mom’s.”

“I think I will.” A hand on Stan’s shoulder, and Kyle leaned in to peck him on the cheek. “Thanks for the doughnuts. I’m kind of — really proud of you.”

“I don’t deserve the credit, dude. I just make candy.”

“Yeah, but candy makes people happy.”

“Well,” said Stan, “you make me happy.”

“How so? I don’t do anything. You know what — never mind.”

“Kyle—”

“One day I want you to come to brunch with me.”

“I will,” Stan promised. “One day. One day when I don’t own a candy shop.” 

Just as Kyle left to grab his box of doughnuts, the cuckoo clock over the door to the kitchen began to chime 10 a.m. As he stepped out of the door, Stan kissed him again, on the lips, with a moment to linger out of view.

“Have fun,” said Stan. “I’ll miss you.”

“Well, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” It was hard to leave, but Kyle had to. It was a 20-minute walk to his mother’s house and brunch was served promptly at 10:15; Kyle was already late. As he stepped out of the shop he paused to watch Stan raise the blinds; a pair of children, probably 8 or 9, were already pushing their way into the store, probably in search of candy, perhaps gummies (which Stan bought wholesale), or perhaps peanut-butter mallow cups (which Stan made himself). The blinds went up and Kyle saw the shop’s rainbow interior, the vinyl booths in the windows, the way bunting and streamers crisscrossed the ceiling. It was ironic that Kyle could only gain a full view of Stanley’s Candies when he was standing outside of it, looking in as if he didn’t belong. 

No one knew they were lovers.

* * *

Over brunch came the usual questions: how’s work, how’s Stan, how’s the shop? Kyle enjoyed his family’s company, to a point, and appreciated that his mother still bothered to cook for them. She was a large woman, and Kyle regretted that he was predisposed to her body type: stout and ample, pale, voluminous hair, crooked nose. He wore his hair short, regretted that he couldn’t tan, only burn, and some days resented living above a candy shop. At least his parents appreciated the doughnuts.

“You should tell Stan to make a yeast doughnut sometime,” Kyle’s father suggested. “It might help his business, take some competition away from Dunkin’ Donuts.”

This was not concern of either Kyle’s or Stan’s. “He’s not really competing with them, and yeast doughnuts are always terrible.”

“Sometimes Lanyon” — who was his father’s paralegal at present — “will bring in a box of Dunkin’ Donuts for everyone, and I always tell him to try Stan’s but I guess Dunkin’ Donuts is on the way.”

“If it’s on the way for _Lanyon_ ” — Kyle did not know him — “then I can’t say with any confidence that it would be worth it for Stan to start making a whole new product just to attract the business of someone who’d be going out of his way, not to mention Stan doesn’t even open the shop until 10, so unless you’ll be sending Lanyon out to get doughnuts—”

“Maybe if Stan opened earlier he could capture that business,” said Kyle’s father, “you know, people on their way to work. And sometimes it’s nice to have a box of doughnut holes — has Stan ever thought about that?”

“Why are you so obsessed with this?” Kyle asked. “If you care so much about doughnuts, go over to Stan’s shop and ask him about it.”

“Oh, knock it off.” This came from Kyle’s mother, who was scrambling eggs over the stove and otherwise humming to herself; Kyle hadn’t actually realized she’d been listening. “They’re just roommates, honestly, stop telling Kyle to get involved.”

“I thought he was involved.”

“No one wants his nosy roommate budding into his retail business.”

“It’d be more like a helpful suggestion from a close friend.”

“Maybe I’ll tell Stan you like yeast doughnuts and he’ll try to make a batch for you” Kyle offered.

“No, don’t do that for me,” said his father, “it’s too much trouble.”

This was the unsettling domain of Jewish parents: “Why is it too much trouble to fry up a dozen just for you, but a great idea to produce them in mass quantities so he can open three hours earlier and sell them to people on their way to work?”

“I was just being helpful from a business standpoint.” Kyle’s father stirred creamer into his coffee and turned back to the paper.

Kyle had a law degree, but he did not have a legal practice; he was an administrative director to the Park Country Chamber of Commerce and for years had worried that this represented some ethical violation. He supposed it was in his favor that no one knew he was in a common-law marriage with the owner of a very prominent Main Street business; if the townspeople were not scandalized by homosexuality as a concept, if they somehow came to accept it in practice, they would almost certainly be horrified at the notion of someone so actively engaged in the town’s commercial fortunes having such a stake in the success of this one little shop. In Kyle’s view the shop was successful without him, though he had, upon taking the position seven years ago, made certain clerical errors in Stan’s favor which Kyle feared might one day come back to haunt him.

Park Country residents had long memories; people Kyle passed on the street while headed to his parents’ had once been classmates whose SAT scores were lower than his, were the children of people with whom his father’s clients had ended up settling out of court, had been the casualties in the wide-open secret of his parents’ wide-open marriage. Stan’s parents had lived next door, his mother still lived there, and his sister and her husband two blocks over; they’d had the same mayor since Kyle had been 8 years old, holed up in the rotunda of the town’s squat city hall, on a plaza which filled with the rabble of enraged citizens any time a slight upset to small-town life became the topic of mainstream discourse. It both was and was not for all of this that Kyle somehow found himself, an educated man in his mid-thirties, suffering under the weight of a relationship he was hiding from everyone.

He did not know how he had ended up in this mess, and he was not sure there was a neat extraction process available to him, either. All Kyle knew was that on this Saturday morning his mother was serving scrambled eggs with chicken sausage and burnt toast, his father was bothering him for the third week in a row about Lanyon the paralegal’s boxes of yeast doughnuts, and that Kyle wished he’d brought the Pink Triangle guide — if for no other reason than that he wanted his parents to see _Stanley’s Candies_ in bold print, the sans serif typeface a sign that it was real. It was real and people would read about it and they would drive up from Denver, or down from Cheyenne, or amidst a journey between Chicago and San Francisco, and see the little shop Stan and Kyle had built together: its red-and-white-striped awnings, its blue-painted brick façade, the planters of azaleas Kyle tended in front. It was a beautiful shop and Kyle wanted people to know that it meant something to him, too.

As usual, his parents split just one doughnut and told him to take the rest home for himself.

“Why don’t you bring them in tomorrow morning?” Kyle asked his father.

“We don’t want to keep them in the house,” his mother said.

“I have _so_ many doughnuts,” Kyle replied, knowing they would never see the half of it.

“It’s very kind of Stan to share with us.” Kyle’s mother handed the box back and kissed him on the brow. She smoothed his hair down with one calloused, broad hand, bracelets rattling, shaped nails — Kyle did not understand how women did anything with those nails. “Tell him thank you if you get a chance.”

“Oh, I will,” said Kyle, meaning that he would see Stan soon.

“Good boy.” Kyle’s mother rubbed his hair and shut him out of the house.

It was September, not yet cold, though it had been raining and there were clogged sewer grates on every corner in South Park. Kyle was careful to avoid the puddles, though he very nearly slipped each time he ran afoul of someone he knew. It was nearly impossible not to.

There was a line out the door of the shop, children slamming their greasy hands into the plate glass windows. Kyle did not tell them to stop; he would not incriminate himself thusly. When he pushed ahead, a mother snapped at him to wait his turn. “I’m not buying anything,” he said. “See, I’ve already got doughnuts.” He shook the box at her to make a point. She had a baby slung over her chest in a body carrier and her eyes were ringed with the sagging look of sleep deprivation. “Do you want these?” he asked.

“How much?”

“Just take them.” Kyle passed them off, careful not to shove the box into the baby’s face, and headed into the store.

The line wrapped around the room, past the couples sharing shakes and stuffing themselves in the windows, past the little boys play-fighting with unicorn pops, around the toddlers breathing heavily against the display-case glass. Kyle hated the thought of Stan on his knees wiping the counters down with Windex, but that was what it took. Running a business was sheer hell. If not for Kyle’s salary — but then, they had separate finances, and Kyle often wrote checks to Stan to pay for the mortgage or the income taxes or to buy up enough edible paraffin wax to pay for reserves over the Halloween-Christmas-Valentine’s corridor, which both ruined and made their existence. As far as the IRS was concerned, this was rent money; Stan had bought the building at 24 with the settlement from his father’s estate. Realty in South Park being what it was, it was less expensive to buy the entire 1930s structure than it had been to renovate. Those had been some of the happiest days, though — Stan in a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, sweating while he stripped the upstairs floors, the radio playing hushed, publicly funded symphonies while Kyle sat with a law book on his lap, overjoyed to get out of the city. It was one of those afternoons when Stan, spent and covered in bits of dry paint, had asked Kyle to move in.

“I have another year of school,” Kyle had said, nervously blushing around his chest and cheeks.

“I can wait,” Stan assured him, and they’d been waiting since.

Kyle snuck behind the counter, where Stan was chatting with a customer, filling a box with champagne truffles and Jordan almonds. He wrapped his chocolates in little gold wrappers, bagged the dragees in cellophane, nestled everything in a teal box imprinted with a logo, and tied it up with a pink ribbon. It was a fussy process to the point of ridicule, but Kyle found it endearing; he watched Stan’s fingers make a confident bow as he chatted with a woman about how she’d driven from Fort Collins to buy these for her sister’s birthday. “I can’t find anywhere that makes champagne truffles the way she likes them,” the woman was saying, “and I’ve looked, believe me.”

“Well, you should be able to taste the alcohol,” Stan was saying, “but it also has to be light, like champagne.”

“No one makes them like that.” The customer shook her head, drawing a card from her wallet. “I was worried I’d have to go to Europe.”

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing,” Stan said, “though I’m glad you stopped here, first.” Kyle had long been infuriated that Stan would not hire employees to work the front of house, in part because he then chatted with them while the line grew longer. Kyle had never seen anyone get out of line; only an idiot would drive here from out of town just to get fed up and turn around and drive right back. Locals didn’t have anywhere else to go, exactly, but Stan commanded a kind of loyalty that Kyle both deeply understood and seldom shared. His loyalty to Stan was steadfast in so many ways: he’d violated his own code of ethics for Stan, gave up the possibility of a legal career in Denver for Stan, had never slept with anyone except for Stan, even as Kyle knew very well that Stan had slept with two other people. He kept this information tucked away for something, some later argument when it might become pertinent.

Kyle could hear the response in his head: “It wasn’t cheating” — and, no, it wasn’t, but when he grew frustrated with Stan, he began to turn this fact over in his mind, as if it were. He’d never stand in a line this long for Stan, especially if he saw him chatting away with customers with no one else helping, less than efficient.

Leaning over as his customer departed, Stan stuck up a finger for the next couple in line and said, “Just give me a sec, please.” He turned to Kyle. “How was brunch?”

“Lanyon loves Dunkin’ Donuts,” said Kyle.

“Who’s that?”

“My father’s paralegal. You know what, never mind. Do you need help here?” Some part of Kyle believed he should be above helping.

“You don’t have to.”

“Do I have anything else to do?” The answer was yes, actually, Kyle had things to do. Their own bathroom was filthy, and Kyle should clean it. He owed a phone call to his brother in Boulder, who was studying for a doctorate in biomechanical — something, Kyle could never remember, and if he thought he had, he always turned out to be wrong. He had a balance at his dermatologist which his insurance would not pay, and though he had only to go upstairs and write a check, tuck it with the pay slip in the enclosed, addressed envelope, stamp it and run it three stores down to the postbox, he reached under the counter for a pair of plastic gloves in a box of 1000.

* * *

If their inclusion in the Pink Triangle Guide was to have an impact, well, it was not readily apparent. It took a few weeks for someone to call, and the phone began to ring while Kyle was in the back with Stan on a Tuesday night, helping him to wrap Buckeyes in shimmering orange wrappers. A batch of 150 had just come out of the fridge, in neat rows on broad baking sheets.

“I’ll get it,” Kyle said, walking to the telephone. Unlike the vintage princess phone next to the register, this was cordless. “Stanley’s Candies,” he said by way of greeting, walking back to the counter on which Stan was still wrapping Buckeyes. Tucking the phone under his chin, Kyle picked up another wrapper.

“Hi,” came a soft voice. There was a gentle lilt to it, and inherent apology for calling at all. “I’m so glad you were open, the book said only till 4.”

It was about 6, Kyle just in from work, still in his collar and button-down. “We’re closed, but you caught someone. Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I was calling — I’m wondering — there’s no good way to put this, but I have to know — is this a gay-owned business?”

Kyle dropped the candy he was holding and clutched the phone with both hands. “Why?” he asked. “Who wants to know?”

“Well, I’m calling from the GLBT Center of Colorado and I was wondering — I saw this shop listed in the Pink Triangle Denver guide that came out recently, and I saw the shop listed, so I was wondering—”

“What were you wondering?” Kyle asked, growing annoyed.

“Who is it?” Stan asked.

Kyle waved away his concern.

“Well, we’re planning our usual local gay business holiday showcase, it’s a holiday shopping event the week after Thanksgiving, and I guess I was just calling to ask you to participate?”

“Okay.” Kyle felt nervous. He’d been to the showcase, though not for many years; typically the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas was insane for Stan, and Kyle typically spent that month in the back, filling orders and packing up gift basket shipments. “I, um — do you have any more information? What’s the cut?”

“Is this a gay-owned business?” the caller asked again. “Honestly, I have to — that’s our criteria. We’re looking for LGBT-owned businesses from within 100 miles of the Denver-Boulder-Fort Collins area—”

“Could you hold a second?”

“What? Oh, sure.”

Kyle pushed the hold button and asked Stan, “Are you gay?”

“Are you looking for a yes or no answer?” Stan was a pro at wrapping these candies and settling them gently in a plastic tub which would go back in the fridge for storage.

“Jesus, Stan.”

“Did someone call on the phone and ask if I’m gay?”

“They want to know if this is a ‘gay-owned’ business, yes, it’s someone from the Center in Denver. They read the guide, I guess.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “Kyle. Should I be concerned that you can’t answer a question about whether I’m gay? Honestly.”

“I meant, are you willing to be publicly gay?”

“We’re already in that guide.”

“Which makes us a ‘gay-friendly’ business, but do you want to tell this fool _you’re_ gay?”

“Let me talk to them.” Stan reached out for the phone. “This is Stan.”

Patiently, Kyle listened in on the conversation, with all of its little pauses and tensions. “I’d say so, yeah.” Stan was back to twisting candy wrappers. “No, that was my boyfriend. He’s sort of helping me. I mean, he is helping me. … He is cute, yes. Yeah, he’s gay too. … I’m certainly willing to consider it, but that’s our busiest season, so, I have to know about the money. … Heh, yeah, well, I have to keep the lights on.”

Stan was silent for a moment, and then he took a deep breath. “Well, the bottom line is, that _is_ an issue for me. I don’t have any employees, it’s just me, and I can’t — please don’t guilt me into it.”

The conversation had become more intense, and Kyle leaned in, hoping to hear what was being said on the other line.

“But I do believe in the cause!” Stan said. “…Well, I suppose I’d be … open to that.”

Kyle tried to make heads or tails of the conversation, but it was no use. He waited patiently for Stan to hand up the phone, which he did with a “thank you, yes, you too” and “we’ll be in touch.” He scribbled something down on a pad. “All right, have a great evening. Thanks for calling.” Stan hung up, settling the handset back in its cradle and trudging back to the table, where Kyle was eagerly waiting to hear the details of the phone call.

“Well?” Kyle leaned over the table, careful not to crush any of the unwrapped Buckeyes on their tray. “How much? What’s the cut?”

“There’s no cut,” said Stan. “It’s for charity.”

“Then you say no.” It seemed obvious enough to Kyle. “Of course. You’re not doing that for free.”

“But here’s the thing. It’s for charity. Colorado AIDS Project. The Denver one, DCAP.”

“That’s where I got tested,” Kyle said. “When I — after we—”

“I know.”

“Well, I write a check, to the Southern Colorado one. To kind of cover you — you know.”

“I know,” Stan repeated. “Look, this isn’t something we have to commit to. But, I said we’d go down to the city and talk about it.”

“Go into the city?” Kyle asked.

“Well, unless you want some caravan coming up here.”

“Maybe they should see the shop. If they want to support gay-owned business, they should _patronize_ the shop, not try to suck us dry!”

“I don’t know that asking me to participate in a holiday fair … thing … is sucking us dry. But I don’t know if I can do it, either.”

“Because of the money?”

“The money’s part of it.” Stan was quiet. He took one of Kyle’s hands, rubbing a thumb around one of Kyle’s knuckles. “There’s a lot that’s on the table here,” he said. “A lot.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” Kyle squeezed Stan’s hand; he loved that Stan was strong, that he could probably crush Kyle’s fingers in his grip, if he wanted. But Stan was gentle; he never would. Pushing the bangs from Stan’s brow, Kyle admired his beauty: his face was symmetrical, eyes blue like cornflowers, an expressive mouth nearly always quirked in at least the faint beginning of a smile. They were best friends growing up, and nearly kissed many times in middle and high school. They should have done, but South Park was a small town, and someone was always watching. Kyle had been terrified, a skinny nerd; he’d been a fast runner with a hard punch but that didn’t stop him from worrying that, were anyone to know about him and Stan, there’d be hell to pay. Stan had muscles now; he lifted and ran. But in high school he was poetic, sat in the back of the classroom and shied away from confrontation. People loved him, he was runner-up for prom king, but he had no chance of winning any fights. Kyle had ached for Stan for years, and if Stan had ached for him, Kyle could only guess. They first slept together as college freshmen, and Kyle knew he was ruined for other people. It took a while — six years — to get together. What Stan did in that time, Kyle barely knew. Two others, but just enough, apparently. He gazed into Stan’s eyes and saw the reflection of his own fear: it was the 1990s, but whatever; there were a thousand people in this town, most of them hardboiled hicks. Kyle was scared of them. If not for Stan, he’d have regretted coming back here.

Their third grade teacher had been dismissed one summer; they’d ended the school year and, upon returning in the fall, found that he was simply gone. Rumors swirled, but Kyle remembered his parents gesturing and trailing off, the reason for Garrison’s departure left unsaid. And there was Stanley’s uncle who lived 15 miles out of town with a Vietnam buddy; when people spoke of Jimbo and Ned they spoke of ‘roommates,’ the same thing Stan and Kyle called their relationship if it were ever to come up. Jimbo and Ned were seldom discussed at all, though.

There was no one punishment Kyle envisioned as he twisted metallic wrappers over the last of the Buckeyes and worried about the consequences. He had no inkling of what might even lay in store for him, no model to reference, no history upon which to draw. That was really what Kyle feared, what he and Stan dreaded: it wasn’t spoken of.

* * *

The sex they had was slow, deliberate, careful, “safe” — though there was no such thing, pamphlets often reminded them — with a lot of eye contact, lips against skin, more touching than Kyle would have liked, and more risk than he should have allowed. But Kyle needed Stan like he needed air and water, and they knew each other’s bodies like flashcards before an exam. When Kyle was 13 he’d memorized a _haftarah_ , and to his mind making love with Stan was just the same: he’d begun slow and creaky, had to continually reference his recording of the cantor chanting trope. Then the little symbols became to Kyle like the Phoenician alphabet and he grew to know them, really know them, and he could perform Jeremiah 16:19 with ease. It wasn’t really a song but something like a wailing dirge, and yet it came to him naturally; it felt necessary, a relief. That was what sex with Stan was like.

They did it the morning of the visit because Kyle was a nervous wreck. Stan typically woke two hours before and went down to the shop to start filling trays with candy, but this morning he stayed in bed with Kyle and held him after bringing him off, their hearts both pounding, cold rain on their bedroom windows. The curtains were shut but they could hear it, that battering on 1930s glass; Stan would redo the windows one day if it killed him. And it might, Kyle thought, that might kill him, it might kill both of them.

Stan was different in their bed; he was vulnerable. He spoke in whispers, told deep secrets, sighed a lot. Kyle was a sucker for that kind of thing, the strong, handsome man with a soft side, everyone’s hero broken down in Kyle’s hands. The paper had said it would be a lovely day but now it was raining, and Kyle had read enough American classics and Bronte sisters and Greek odes to know the weather told truths about quality of life. They could run away to Denver, he told himself; he should ask this man from Center: if something befalls us, will you help?

Kyle filled with a blinding resentment toward Stan’s father, for dying; in life he’d been a boorish prick, a child-man with a serious drinking problem who loudly professed his love for his only son in drunken stupors and, alternately, teased Stan for being quiet and creative, taunted him, tried to urge him toward heterosexual complacency with guilt and latent threads: “When I’m gone you’ll have to be the man around here,” was one of the last things Randy told him; it was laced with double-edged passive-aggression, a taunt more than anything. But Stan took that seriously; if Randy’s attitude could be shaken off, Stan had a hard time letting go of his mother and sister. The best revenge Stan ever got was coming out to Randy in the last weeks: “I’m gay, you know, and Kyle’s my lover. We’ll be happy together. I know you want me to be happy.” With a tube all the way down Randy’s throat, it never left the room. That was the last time Kyle saw Stan’s father, until he was made up in a casket at the wake. It was a proud moment, the two of them in the first flushes of renewed love and determined to make it last. Nearly 10 years on and Kyle felt it wasn’t such a fight, more luck than struggle, that he and Stan were nearly compatible. Resentment was the food of Kyle’s love and while he cursed Randy Marsh for trapping them here, for leaving Stan to take up the burden of heading the family, Kyle also strived to make that man turn over in his grave. He hoped it was working.

Not that Kyle believed in such things. His life was a balance of contentment and worry. This morning, he was worried. It was Sunday, Stan’s day off. Stan would never get more than two hours’ rest at a time, though at least today he could linger in bed with Kyle. Trying not to think of their upcoming meeting, Kyle let Stan trace his lips with his thumb and blather about his upcoming birthday: “There’s a home game on the twenty-second of October, against the Chiefs. I could scalp tickets. It’d be fitting.”

“I’d go if you wanted.”

“I know you don’t like football.”

“Football’s fine.” Having played pee-wee football in elementary school, Kyle lacked the mystification some gay men put on: “It’s so confusing, I don’t even know what’s happening, what’s a down, what is happening, this is so _homoerotic_ ” – he’d heard it a million times. But nor did Kyle connect with the redneck culture that surrounded him daily, less suburban jock than lawless rural aggression, all mob mentality and ritual violence. He would sit in the bleachers or the stands or what-have-you with Stanley and sip a Coors and feel the chill of mid-October in his bones regardless of the number of sweaters he pulled on or whether he cracked into heat packs and stuffed them into his boots. He would be bored by the second quarter if not for Stan in his Broncos knit cap, black hair sticking awkwardly out from underneath it, his cheeks red from brisk winds even in Mile High Stadium. They’d buy hot dogs and pretzels from wandering salesmen and try, and fail, not to pass each other knowing glances when half-naked men, their bodies painted royal blue and traffic-cone orange, called fans of the other team “faggot” and threatened to rape their quarterback. “Sure,” said Kyle, “let’s go, I mean, it’s your birthday.” It would be Stan’s thirty-fifth birthday. It felt both immensely old and hardly anything.

Jules from the Center was coming by at 2, so they spent the morning and early afternoon readying for his visit. Stan had grabbed some things from downstairs – nonpareils, No. 32 icing tips, piping bags – and he sat at the kitchen table, shirtless under an apron, plaid boxers bunched under his thighs, as he coiled buttercream onto a dozen chocolate cupcakes. Kyle set the dining room table: Stan’s grandmother’s lace tablecloth, Kyle’s mix-and-match china, heavy flatware from a junk shop 50 miles west of Omaha. It was a pain to keep polished but everyone was impressed, or at least, the handful of occasional visitors who’d been allowed upstairs marveled at how well-kept things were. From the Sooper Foods up the road Kyle had brought home a cheap bouquet of Gerberas, and he packed them into a blue vase with baby’s breath and a eucalyptus twig. When the table was set he saw to the sandwiches, tuna fish on rye and tomato with cheddar and mayo on sourdough. It wasn’t traditional, but there was something for everyone. Stan liked to serve tea biscuits with a dollop of lemon curd and a strawberry slice, finished with powdered sugar. They arranged everything, then dressed themselves, then sat back down at the kitchen table and waited, nervously. Jules, with his abrupt, hissing name and feathery telephone cadence was fitted to a homespun tea with finger foods and kelly-green and yellow daisies.

They were shocked to find that Jules was a hefty man in a plaid flannel and khakis, his head shaved, a ring in his nose. Kyle, in his gauzy button down and white jeans, felt silly. It took real effort to get Stan into even so much as a tie, and here Kyle had talked him into slicking his hair back and scrubbing under his nails. Kyle reassured himself that there was chocolate under there that would never otherwise come out.

“You have a lovely home,” Jules told them, surveying pictures of Stan and Kyle at Zion National Park, the Capilano Bridge, and on Folsom Street. The place was tastefully done with mint green walls, original tiling in the entry, and tin ceilings Stan had carefully restored while Kyle fretted over his bar exam, which he’d ultimately declined to take. Kyle was most pleased with their midcentury furniture, lovingly gathered over many years of painstakingly combing the local second-hands and classifieds. They kept their TV in the bedroom where it was hooked up to a VCR, which they used to record programs (soaps, _Deep Space Nine_ ) and play porno. A two-page whiskey ad spread from a vintage Life Magazine hung over the bed in matching frames and an old Herman Miller bench sat at the foot of the bed. A taxidermied grouse stood atop the dresser. They did not show Jules the bedroom.

As the tea steeped they made small talk; Jules had set a branded folder on the table but hadn’t opened or so much as looked at it. He discussed his journey to Denver by way of Boston, where he’d studied applied psychology at Boston College, gone into the gay political scene after considering, and deciding against, the clergy. “It was something I really grappled with,” he said over a cup of lapsang souchong, “But there was this boy, and I really didn’t think I could give up sex with him. Everyone else, I could do that, but not him, oh no. As you might expect, he’s gone — but I found other boys, and one of them started a residency here in Denver — this was ten years ago. Tempus fugit, I suppose. That’s why the work we’re doing is so important.”

Kyle felt it was on him to explain things. “We know, and we agree, it’s just — you drove through the county on the way up here. It’s no Boston, it’s not even Denver.”

“It must take guts, to be gay in a town like this.”

“Well, I imagine it would, yeah, but we haven’t got any. No one’s gay in South Park.”

“Oh, but we’re everywhere,” said Jules.

“But not in this town,” said Stan. He had been quiet throughout the conversation, but something about this topic pushed him to speak: “Have a cupcake.” He pushed the tea tray toward Jules and turned to Kyle. “I’m going to have one — hon, you want one? Want to split one?”

“I’ll have my own,” Kyle said, and he let Stan pick one out for him, the one with the most frosting and the fewest nonpareils.

“We want to support the work.” Stan helped himself to a cupcake and sliced it in half, the blade cutting cleanly through the middle to reveal a center of pastry cream. “I’ve benefitted from it — we both have. We want to help others benefit, sure. But what happens if this backfires on us? What happens if we lose our business? You’re the first person who’s come on account of the Pink Triangle thing. If we’re exposed, it’s all over.”

“Is it though?” Jules asked. He was eating a second cupcake, licking frosting from his fingers. His manners were abominable, and Kyle shuddered to think of how he’d have to treat and launder and iron the tablecloth. “How do you know what’s going to happen?”

“Isn’t that just it?” Kyle asked. “If we knew it’d be okay, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“Maybe what you’re doing is not giving the people who love you a chance to really know you, and accept you. Just try it.”

“Okay, but this isn’t like a plate of liver and onions, or something, where I’ve never had it before and maybe I’ll like it,” Kyle said. “This is a situation in which most, if not all, of this town has never met a gay person before, at least not knowingly. It’s not so easy to just go for it because these are our lives. It we try it and it doesn’t go so well, I don’t know what we’re going to do. And so far, you haven’t exactly given us any ideas about what’s going to happen if we did come out and it backfired.”

“It’s because I don’t have any ideas,” said Jules. “It’s not a safe thing to do, I’m sorry, it’s just inherently not a safe thing. If it were, more people would do it. But I can tell you something else, which is that every single man and woman who’s ever made the decision to come out had to make it not knowing what would happen to them, and without a cushion of safety. And visibility helps. You say most of the people on this town don’t know any gays, well — what if they did? And they were you? I’m sure some people would react negatively, and you’d lose some business, and maybe some friends — and that would be awful, and no one’s going to tell you it wouldn’t. But other people, they might say — well, I like these guys, and they were gay all along, so maybe my assumption that I don’t like gays was wrong, too.”

“I don’t think you really know the kind of people who live in this town,” Stan said. “There are a lot of things to love about South Park, but the people who live here don’t admit to wrongness very often.”

“It’s almost a town mindset. The power of the mob mentality is strong here.”

“Well, how is that not like anywhere else?” Jules asked. “Honestly.”

“It’s a small town. Most people just don’t get them,” said Stan. “Please try to believe us.”

“I do believe you,” said Jules, “but I also know that when you spend your whole life someplace, you fail to realize how it might surprise you. And that’s not a dig at you guys, just a fact of life.”

When Jules excused himself to use “the little boys’ room,” Kyle helped himself to a second cupcake and sighed. “This guy is talking in platitudes.”

“No one talks in platitudes.”

“It’s just a figure of speech,” Kyle mumbled, peeling the paper off his cupcake. “He’s pandering, you know, he wants free labor from us, that’s all.”

“Yeah, free labor that benefits — a charitable cause? What’s so wrong with that, and besides, not all platitudes are wrong.”

“It’s risky, Stanley.”

“I know.” Stan sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Believe me, I know.”

* * *

There was much to think about. As Jules drove off, Stan and Kyle were left to clean up. Beginning with the table, Kyle began scraping off leftovers and stacking dishes.

“Hey, no, I can do that.”

“Your whole life is this stuff.” Kyle was not sure why he was getting defensive over dishes. “I can do it.”

“Just let me—”

“I want to.” Shocked at the edge to his voice, Kyle took the stack of dishes to the kitchen and began to rinse them. He scrubbed at the grease on each plate as the water grew hotter and hotter, sliding every piece of china into the dishwasher the moment water ran clear off of it, no visible suds. Facing the wall, Kyle could hear Stan’s heavy breathing from the doorway.

“What do you want to do?”

Kyle shut off the tap and turned to appraise Stan, who held the empty tea pot in his hands. “I want to go back to age 18 and make totally different choices,” said Kyle. “But I can’t do that, so I guess what I want is to just get up every day without having to worry about anything.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve given you tons to worry about.”

“Bring me the tea pot, Stan.” It was a shame to see him like this — like the life had gone out of him. It took no effort to pry the tea pot out of Stan’s slack grip.

“I’ll clear off the rest of the table,” Stan said, and before Kyle could ask him not to, he was doing it.

But that was very Stan; it was quite a Stan thing to do. They spent their afternoon and evening quietly, and when dinnertime came, Stan suggested they go out, not wanting to waste more energy cooking. Down at the Shakey’s Kyle tried to internalize what Stan must be thinking, but nothing came. Stan knew precisely what Kyle wanted on a pizza, to the extent that Kyle did not even know what Stan preferred. On the drive back to their apartment, the car smelled of Shakey’s, that particular mingling of sweet tomato sauce and grease. The box sat awkward on Kyle’s thighs, its warmth not like the tap while Kyle washed dishes but, honestly, something much closer to the feel of Stan’s hands pressed against Kyle’s stomach as they lay locked on their sides together in their cozy little bed. It was in these moments that Kyle felt most at peace, but they never lasted for more than two hours, when an alarm would go off and Stan would get up, and Kyle would have to pretend he hadn’t heard it, hadn’t woken up, too. They ate the pizza over the kitchen sink, not discussing much of anything. Stan mentioned that he had to make maple fondant sometime next week, and Kyle nodded at this because what was he supposed to do with that information? At one point in his life, Kyle had really loved to watch Stan creaming fondant; it took a lot of upper-body strength to get it right, and Stan had beautiful arms. But it was hard to muster enthusiasm, and Kyle found that it was still early when he got into bed.

So bothered that he couldn’t sleep, Kyle was relieved when Stan finally joined him. “What were you doing?” he asked, knowing well he sounded weirdly suspicious. Like Stan was doing anything extraordinary in any sense.

“Mostly thinking.” Stan smelled like Gillette aftershave and baking soda toothpaste. It made Kyle hard. “Is it so wrong to want to be in the closet?”

“So you want to let that dude down, huh? Good, I say fuck him.”

“It’s not about that guy,” Stan said, “and you know it’s not.”

“But we owe him an answer.”

“Two seconds ago it was ‘fuck him,’ but now we owe him an answer?”

“Well, it’s the polite thing to do. I’m a polite person.”

“The social graces find favor in your virtue.”

Kyle wrinkled his nose as how needlessly gay that sounded.

“That’s cute, that face,” said Stan, and he leaned over to press a kiss to one of Kyle’s warm cheeks.

Kyle leaned over to switch off the lamp. His dick was painfully full. He waited only a few breaths until Stan’s palm slid against it.

* * *

Kyle told Stan to make yeast doughnuts.

“I hate yeast doughnuts,” Stan protested, “and you can get passable ones at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“I know, but you don’t have to make trays of them or anything. Just whip up half a dozen. My parents would love some. You can throw them into the fryer with the sour creams on Saturday morning.”

“It’s not that simple! They fry at a lower temperature, because they’re lighter, for less time. I’ve never really done it before. I don’t know if I could do it.”

“Of course you could do it,” Kyle said.

“But I don’t know if it would turn out well.”

Getting up, Kyle wrapped his arms around Stan’s shoulders. He was quite literally broad-shouldered, in the shining, lyrical way Kyle had thought about the kind of guy he wanted to be with when he grew up. Maybe it had been the subtle, genetic influence of Stan’s presence in his life. Kyle pressed himself to Stan’s warm body. “I don’t ask for much,” Kyle said, and it was true — barely anything. “My parents will be touched by the _gesture a_ nd they’re not discerning. Just make the fucking doughnuts, Stanley.”

That was how Kyle ended up bringing a box of one dozen yeast donuts, all dressed in sugar and pumpkin pie spice mix, to his mother’s house for brunch one Saturday. Kyle was so nervous that the box shook in his hands as he took in South Park that morning: its quiet, the pine scent, and the way the cars were parked in their driveways, the snow in the streets pure white except in fresh tire tracks, where it was flecked with dark gray. You didn’t get snow like that in the city.

It was still snowing as Kyle approached the house, flakes sticking to the box for a split-second before melting. Kyle smelled the cinnamon and the felt the residual warmth of the fryer through his knit gloves. He was still trembling, even though the faint smell of cinnamon reminded him of Stan.

His father opened the door. “Kyle,” he said, “you don’t need to bring us doughnuts.”

“I know, but—”

“Is it still snowing? Come in.”

Kyle’s heart sank at how his father took his scarf and chided him over his too-thin coat. It was a very brief walk and Kyle was used to the cold. He took the doughnuts into the kitchen, where his mother was chopping onions. “I’m running behind,” she said, barely glancing at her son. “Take a coffee, bubbe, go sit with Dad in the living room.”

“I had coffee already.”

“Take one anyway,” she insisted, and Kyle did because she was his mother. He always used the same mug; once, it had said his name on it, but now it was faded.

Sitting down with his father in front of the morning news, Kyle held the cup in his hands. It was hot, directly on his skin. He didn’t like it. His stomach was doing something he was not sure it had done before, bunching itself into the smallest little pocket so that Kyle felt like he’d been punched in the gut. He wasn’t hungry. His father asked him, “Good week?”

“It was okay.” Kyle swallowed. “Yours?”

He’d do this individually. In that case, if his father should happen to ask him to leave, he wouldn’t have to see the reaction on his mother’s face.

“When you reach a certain point,” said Gerald, “every week is about the same. Nothing bad happened. Just, the same.”

“Not quite the same.” Kyle shifted.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I haven’t.” Kyle cleared his throat. “I, um. Stan. I got him to um — he made you yeast doughnuts. Instead of cake this week. So, not quite the same.”

“Kyle.” There was a fatherly pause. “You don’t have to bring us doughnuts. Least of all special ones.”

“Well, but you’re always saying — Lanyon brings you Dunkin’ Donuts, and these are better, they’re fresh, they’re practically still warm, and Stan made them — they’re better.” In truth Kyle did not know if they were better, hadn’t tasted them. But of course they were, if Stan made them.

“You know we can’t eat a whole dozen donuts.”

“Well, just — please try. You’re always talking about that Lanyon guy and his doughnuts.”

“Am I always talking about him?”

“Yes.”

Kyle’s father sat up and turned to him. “I hadn’t realized I brought him up so much.”

“Well, you do, so. I can take a hint. You hate sour cream doughnuts. Well, these are more like Dunkin’ Doughnuts, so please try them.”

“We’ll try them, don’t worry. I hadn’t realized, Kyle, honestly. I’d just been thinking for so long, about Lanyon — I suppose I was doing it subconsciously.”

“What about Lanyon? If he makes doughnuts, I promise, Stan’s are better.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” said Gerald. “I don’t know if he cooks. He probably doesn’t. Or maybe he does, who’s to say. But you could ask him, if you wanted to meet. I was thinking — maybe you’d like him.”

Kyle was taken aback. “I have plenty of friends,” he said, though beside Stan it wasn’t really true, at least not outside of the small group of people from town he’d gone to school with. Many of his friends were still in Denver, or had moved to the coasts, having followed through on the promise of their legal careers. A round handful of the friends Kyle had met in college or just after had summarily passed away.

“I just worry, or your mother and I worry, that you get lonely. I mean, of course I hope you’re not lonely.”

“I’m not lonely,” said Kyle, wondering what his father was getting at. “I don’t really need to make friends with Lanyon. I live with Stan. He’s pretty good company.”

Kyle’s father looked uncomfortable, and though he was older and thinner and had a neatly trimmed beard, and though he wore a yarmulke to cover up his baldness, Kyle hoped he did not look like that when he made unpleasant faces. “I’m sure Stan is great company, but I was thinking, he’s just a roommate, and at some point you might want to — meet someone, maybe. You can’t live with Stan forever.”

It was a small bit of grace that Kyle neither began to cry nor felt impelled to run out of the room, out of the house, and never come back. He was not a crier and his personality was such that he would have preferred to avoid situations he might want to flee in the first place. But here he was, feeling vulnerable, wishing Stan could have been there; Stan would have made it better by virtue of his presence.

“I did meet someone,” Kyle said; his voice sounded thin, not his own. “I met Stan.” The coffee mug was shaking in Kyle’s hands; he figured his hands must not have stopped shaking since he’d woken up that morning.

Gerald sat up, a hand to his cheek. “I didn’t realize…”

“How would you have? I never told you.” Kyle took a gulp of his coffee. It has cooled down to lukewarm, which he found unpalatable, but he swallowed it anyhow. “But you figured it out anyhow, I guess. I was actually going to tell you—”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” said Kyle’s father.

“No,” said Kyle. “I have to. Stan’s shop — our shop, we’re going to be in a gay business holiday shopping thing in Denver next month. Not that I think anyone around here would go, but it’s too risky not to tell you, so. We don’t want you guys finding out.” Kyle’s heart was beating so swiftly he feared he might pass out. “From someone else, or through the grapevine.”

“Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’m fine,” said Kyle. “Ghosts aren’t real.”

“Does Sharon know?”

Kyle shook his head. “Stan’s writing her a letter,” Kyle added, though Stan hadn’t begun it yet. He took a deep breath. “You knew I was gay, but didn’t realize I was with Stan?”

“I didn’t think Stan was — into that.”

“He’s really into it,” Kyle said, surprising himself. “But I’m the obvious one, I guess. It must be pretty obvious?”

“Well, you’re my son,” said Gerald, “and I don’t know Stanley as well as I know you.”

“How could you know and not say anything to me?”

“I just did. But I could ask you the same.”

“Dad,” Kyle said. He had nothing to follow it up with.

“I think Lanyon’s going to be disappointed. He’s a bright kid, you know, he’s applying to law schools and he’ll go next fall, I thought that would be good for you.”

“Do you think Stan isn’t good for me?”

“I don’t know,” said Gerald. “I’d never actually thought about it.”

“I’m in love with him,” Kyle said. “I moved back here for him.”

“You should bring him over sometime.”

“Well, he works all the time. And I don’t think that’ll change in the future, unless the whole town finds out and we — something happens.”

“What could happen?” Gerald asked.

“Jesus, Dad, I don’t even want to think about it.”

“There’s always a job for you with me, if you want it. If you want to be a lawyer again.”

“I was never a lawyer,” Kyle said.

“You could be one, though, if you wanted,” said Gerald. “You have the temperament for it.”

“No I don’t. If I did, I would have done it, but that’s not me.”

“Then I really hope after this conversation you can be a little more you around us, if you want.”

“I don’t know,” said Kyle. “What I really would like is to go somewhere else for a time, but we have to stay here because Stan can’t leave him family. I can’t believe this is even happening, I mean, I was going to tell you. We didn’t want to. Stan still doesn’t want to.”

“The thing is I’ve always known,” said Gerald. “I just figured you’d get around to it sometime. And then I started to wonder if you just needed a nudge. And then Lanyon was hired.”

“Fuck Lanyon,” said Kyle. “No offense. I’m sure he’s great.”

“Well, he’s a very competent paralegal,” said Gerald, and that was more or less the end of it. Maybe his mother had heard some of it, or maybe not. She didn’t pester him about it over breakfast, chatting instead about nice Moira Berenbaum, with whom Kyle at first thought his mother might be trying to set him up. Little by little, it became clear that she was the vice-president of the sisterhood and was on Kyle’s mother’s committee for the big end-of-year can drive. “I don’t think she collected all those cans herself,” Sheila hissed, her tone morphing from praiseworthy to Machiavellian. “I think she bought them at King Sooper’s and said she collected them.”

“So?” Kyle asked. “People still get fed, so what does it matter if she bought them or collected them?”

“It’s the principle.”

“Is it really?

“Well, yes, what else is the point of having a food drive?”

“To feed the poor,” Kyle gritted out.

“Oh, all right,” Sheila said, as if she were agreeing for the sake of complacency. “Well, Kyle, if you’re so good at running the food drive, why don’t you take over for me next year?”

“Because I’m not part of the synagogue sisterhood, and I have better things to do.”

“I guess,” Sheila agreed. “Well, you’ll do what you want.”

“Yeah, I guess I will.”

Leaving his parents’, Kyle felt defeated. He had heard for years that after the confession, relief would flood him and he would know some kind of inner rest. The feeling never came. In its place Kyle hustled back to Stan, through the early snow, the town’s eerie calm his only companion. Some Halloween decorations were left up in other shop windows on Main, but Stan had put up more generic autumnal accents for Thanksgiving at the end of the month: a wreath of leaves and acorns on the door; wheat stalks and planters of mums flanked with Indian corn. The fussy precision of it was real, even if the spirit behind such a display was more set-dressing than enthusiasm. Kyle felt in most ways as if he really knew Stan, but then, at times he struggled to discern sincerity in Stan’s actions. In Kyle’s brief habit of seeing a therapist he’d been told that some of this confusion related to his own sense of inadequacy, that he doubted Stan’s earnestness in mundane matters — his relationship to the town, his store, his interest in football — because he doubted at his core that Stan could love him. Trudging into the shop, Kyle was visited by this old theory. What else had Kyle doubted? The idea that his parents would accept a relationship between the two of them — but there it was, they just had. Not with total ease, but without real strife. What other doubts should Kyle overturn? As soon as he was inside he stamped his feet on the ground to shake off packed snow and stood up straighter. He had horrible posture — if he didn’t fix it soon, he was liable to shrivel up like that, he often thought to himself. If only he’d become a doctor; then he’d know whether that premonition was sensible or ludicrous.

At the counter, Stan was ringing up a customer, a middle-aged man with three young children in tow. There was a line, and as usual, patrons sitting in the windows. Stanley was interviewing the kids about what they’d gotten for Halloween, and much to Kyle’s annoyance they were answering gamely with descriptions of tiny packets of M&Ms, wrapped Twizzlers, and other store-bought stuff. Stan didn’t belittle their trick-or-treat hauls as he handed their father a prettily tied box of something far superior: “It sounds like you guys really cleaned up out there.”

As they affirmed with nods and stammering that, yes, they sure had, Kyle wondered what they’d think if they knew the truth. Try as Kyle might not to wonder, he had to. He wished they knew. He wanted to tell them.

“In a word,” Stan said, scooping chocolate-covered almonds into a cellophane bag for his next customer, “how’d it go?”

“I’m not disowned,” Kyle replied.

“That’s three words.” Stan grabbed a ribbon from a box of them he kept near the register. “That sounds good.”

“I don’t know about good.”

“I wish we could talk about it right now.” Stan stood up and put the bag of almonds on his scale. “Okay,” he said to a fat woman with red cheeks whose hair was damp with melting snow. He punched in the SKU. “That’ll be seven-eighty-one.”

“Do you take travelers’ checks?” she asked.

“That has actually never come up,” Stan said.

“I don’t think you do.” Kyle leaned against the counter, tempted to grab a pair of plastic gloves and start filling orders himself. 

“Everyone must take them,” said the woman, who had short, bristly hair and a German accent. “It’s required.”

“Is it really?” Stan asked. A check was being waved in his face.

Kyle knew he couldn’t do it. “I have to go.” 

“All right.” Stan had grasped the check and was looking at its watermark. “Go on, I’ve got this.”

“It’s honestly not my job.” Kyle slipped away past a boy eating an ice cream sundae in the window, the hot fudge smeared all over the vinyl of his seat. He had to wedge his way around customers standing in a line that stretched past his front door. On the other side of it, he trudged up the stairs to his bed, where he lay just too cold to get out from under the covers and adjust the heat. They had a hot-water radiator that clunked and hissed while Kyle drifted from light dozing to self-pity. Stan should have been there with him, clutching Kyle from behind in the warmth of their cozy little bedroom.

Just after 4 Stan came in, breathless, collapsing on the bed. Kyle hadn’t realized he’d passed out, but he woke up and pulled Stan’s arm into his, pressing his face against it. 

“I locked up,” Stan said, fingers in Kyle’s hair. “Maybe I’ll take a nap until dinner, and then after dinner I can do down and work on marshmallow patties for the thing—”

“Will those stay fresh until the end of the month?”

“I guess.” Stan yawned, and Kyle felt bad for him, and moreover, suddenly selfish for having questioned why Stan couldn’t afford to spend Saturdays at brunch with Kyle’s parents’ and lazing around together in bed. In or out, it didn’t truly matter; Stan would be shackled to his schedules regardless. 

“I hate this,” said Kyle.

“Sorry.” Stan’s fingers dropped away and he crossed his arms over his chest.

“Not you. Just, the obligations, the sense of obligation without belonging. I’m sick of owing things to everyone without feeling like I’m getting something in return.”

“You know,” said Stan, “I used to feel that way. I guess I used to be a lot more cynical. But now, I don’t know. I think we have it pretty well — considering.”

And Kyle thought about it, long into the evening, after they had had brisk, painless sex that felt to Kyle like it was over before it had really begun. Flat on his back in their messy, half-empty bed, he thought about those considerations: they were both healthy, within reason. They had means to take a trip once in a blue moon. They had each left South Park in search of something neither of them could define and come to realize, after they’d gone, that the thing they’d been looking for was each other. Just because it was convenient, Kyle had to assure himself, did not invalidate the meaning of it.

Kyle wanted to force himself up, to make something for dinner or at least to flush the lube out of his ass; Stan had been quick afterward with the cursory dab of a baby wipe, but that impure greasy feeling would grow sickening by morning. And yet cleaning it out would only serve to remove the lingering trace of Stan, who was only downstairs in the back of his shop pouring a proprietary blend of Callebaut chocolates into patty molds. But downstairs was so far, and there was a stack of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ cassettes to watch, taped first-run off the TV. Stan would come back upstairs when his work was done, and Kyle knew it.

That was how Kyle knew that if Stan ever failed to do so, he should worry.

* * *

Though Stanley had lapsed his mother was still a bit Catholic around the edges; the entire town was, but Stan had never been sure if his mother’s beliefs were in line with her practice or not. She didn’t talk about it much, though she had gone back to church on Sundays since Randy’s death, and both Stan and his sister had been through the whole confirmation rigmarole, through which he’d learned that there was no saint named Stanley, only a “Stanislaus,” and as a kid that had seemed unfair. Kyle remembered hearing of it, because Stan had liked to complain. “I don’t have any connection to that guy,” Stan had said, and it was true.

Stan dictated the letter to his mother over a rimmed baking sheet of maple fondant, which he creamed with a wooden spatula; it took effort to get through, but Stan did this several times a week. Kyle sat in the corner on a chair and took notes faithfully: “I didn’t mean to hide this from you. But I didn’t mean to tell you, either. We know what Dad would have said, so all I ask from you is that you’ll try to rise above the standard he’d have set. It would really mean a lot to me.”

“Is that really all you want to say?” Kyle asked, looking up from his legal pad.

The spatula made clanking noises against greased metal; the baking sheet clattered against the tabletop and it brought a kind of concentrated rhythm to the conversation, until Stan paused, wiping his brow with his forearm. “I want to say a lot of things, but I don’t think I should.”

“What kind of things?”

“Things like, if you’re mad at me, I’ll be disappointed. Not hurt, just disappointed.”

“You should just put that in,” said Kyle.

“It’s too much like a threat.” Under the bright lights reflected from the aluminum work surface, Stan was beginning to sweat through the effort of creaming. He took a break to wipe his sticky hands on a rag. He didn’t wear gloves to do this, so he scrubbed under the tap for a few seconds while Kyle stared at the spoon sticking straight up out of the lump of maple fondant on the baking tray. “I’m an adult, so who cares what she thinks?”

“You do, if you’re dictating this letter.”

“I don’t want her to find out from someone else, is all.” Stan pinched a bit of fondant off the ball and began to roll it in his fingers. “Let’s just see if this holds its shape.”

When it didn’t, Stan passed the piece of fondant to Kyle. Maple creams were his favorite.

* * *

Around 10 the doorbell rang, and Kyle wasn’t ready. He could have been, but he’d woken up in a panic — what if he ran out of time? What if everything was awkward, what if he misread the sticky bun instructions? Stan had left them to proof in a cake pan overnight and taped a note to the fridge: _45 minutes before, preheat oven to 375_. They were supposed to be fresh from the oven so that the scent of warm caramel filled the apartment just as the door was opened, but nothing ever timed out so perfectly as that. Stan was still standing over the oven with his candy thermometer, just now adding the pecans to the mixture. “I’ve almost got the right consistency. You should just grab the door.”

“But the coffee’s not even brewed.”

“Listen,” said Stan, “it’s okay to be a little lax. We don’t have to impress anyone.”

“Are you insane? Yes we do.”

Stan put a lid on his saucepan of caramel and grabbed Kyle by the shoulders. “They wouldn’t have come if they didn’t want to be here.”

“I guess,” Kyle agreed, starting to relax — and then the bell rang again. “Jesus christ!”

“It’ll be fine.” The egg timer rang and Stan grabbed it. “You’d better go.”

Kyle worried. He envisioned disaster: the curtains catching fire, someone slipping in the bathroom and needing to be hauled out on a stretcher. What if the caramel on the sticky buns was too hot, and it burned someone’s tongue? Stan was making eggs benedict, and it was needlessly complex: tart hollandaise, perfectly poached eggs, English muffins kept warm all morning in an oven set low enough to keep them from drying out. There was a fruit salad with pomegranate seeds and a honey-yogurt-lime dressing; it was sitting on the table already in a hollowed-out watermelon.

Stan could reassure all he wanted, but Kyle knew he was nervous, too.

Heart racing, Kyle opened the door. “Come upstairs,” he said, trying not to faint from trepidation. “You remember the landing is narrow, so watch out.”

“Kyle,” his mother chided, “we remember, don’t worry so much.”

“I’m not worried!”

“Bubbe, you’re shaking.”

“Kyle, relax.” 

“Dad, I am relaxed! I just haven’t had enough coffee.” Technically, Kyle felt, this couldn’t possibly be a lie; even though he’d had four cups “enough coffee” was whatever amount kept him from trembling before they sat down to eat. Kyle helped himself to a fifth cup after serving his parents, and they all stood in the living room staring at each other, the snow coming down hard now. Kyle felt guilty for not going to their place for brunch the day before, but this arrangement was more sustainable. “You shouldn’t have to spend your day off cooking for your — my parents,” Kyle had insisted, but Stan seemed happy to do it: “They’re like, I don’t know, your parents. That’s worth quite a lot to me, I guess.”

And Kyle had nothing to say to that. He’d lain in bed all night excited, unable to sleep, a smile plastered on his face as Stan fidgeted. The alarm went off every two hours, but Kyle was used to coaxing himself back to sleep after Stan settled into the covers again. Maybe it was too much coffee balanced with tiredness that made him so nervous.

“It smells delicious in here,” Kyle’s mother said, and she shot him a smile; she was trying to be polite. 

“Stan’s making sticky buns,” Kyle told her, finally taking a seat on the divan they’d shoved up against the bay window.

“How was the fair?” Kyle’s father asked. “You never told us about it. The showcase thing.”

“It was fine.”

“Did you make a lot of money?”

“We did okay,” said Kyle. “We didn’t keep it, it all went to charity.”

“You look so beautiful right now.”

“What?”

“Under that garland,” said Sheila. It was strung up around the bay window, pinned to the eaves with fat red bows. “The pine needles, with your coloring, it’s very pretty. I mean — for Christmas, obviously, I suppose.”

“Oh,” said Kyle. “Well, thanks, I suppose. Yeah, for Christmas.” He was almost out of coffee again; his mug had gone lukewarm. “Listen, let me show you something.” Gingerly, Kyle got up; shaking, he ran into the kitchen.

Stan was ladling caramel and pecans onto the bun. “This is almost ready,” he said, not bothering to look up. “I’ve got Canadian bacon in the toaster oven.”

“Where’s our book?” Kyle asked.

“Oh! I think it’s still on the bedside table.”

They’d been perusing it casually in bed, dog-earring pages and circling listings, getting ideas about places to go after Valentine’s when business slowed down a bit: saunas in the city where the clientele had been coming, year after year, since the 70s; stores that sold complicated and edgy floral arrangements; a dirty old saloon in Breckinridge where the one-eyed bartender only sold Coors on tap, nothing more and nothing less, and on Thursdays there was still a hanky night. Neither Stan nor Kyle had any experience with hankies, but there was no harm in visiting. Here was a world of opportunities, of people to meet and things to try. 

As scared of rejection as Kyle could be, he also wanted that world and everything in it. He wanted to take or reject every aspect of himself free from fear of rejection by anyone else. Not because he felt entitled to live without rejection; he knew that was one of the many things life could encompass, some fair and some foul, and that not everyone would like him, need him, love him with the same fierceness as intensity as did Stan. But Kyle wished for the freedom to pay no heed to rejection, to let it simply _be_ , stand as fact, rather than something that consumed him. 

That’s why he was so nervous when he handed his parents the guide: these were the only two people in the world whose rejection would consume him, for certain.

“Technically it’s not my store, I guess,” Kyle said, peeling back the pages. “But I’m really proud of it. Look at this.” He handed the open book to his parents, pointing to the listing.

“Is this going to bring in some extra cash?” Gerald asked.

“Typical,” said Sheila, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t know,” said Kyle. “Probably not much. The profit margin on this kind of thing is — quite slim.”

“But, you have your salary,” said Kyle’s mother.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m thinking of resigning.”

“Don’t do that,” said Gerald.

“Whatever for?”

Kyle took a seat across from his parents and let himself slump over. “I think if it becomes known that Stan and I are in a relationship, rather than just roommates, it’ll look like I’m playing favorites. And then there’d be a scandal. I don’t think I could do that.” Kyle thought for a moment about whether to confess that, in fact, he had played favorites; Stan had always been Kyle’s favorite, and no matter how detrimental to his health, mental and physical, he had to stick with Stan forever, however long that might be. Of course, he couldn’t tell about his casual disregard for commercial ethics. They wouldn’t approve.

“That would be a real shame,” said Sheila.

“You could always come back to the law.”

“I don’t know,” said Kyle. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Well, you don’t have to cross that bridge right now. The town doesn’t have to find out.”

“I’m tired of people not knowing, Dad.” 

“If you let me make some calls it’ll be on the front page of the paper tomorrow morning,” said Kyle’s mother.

“Well, I don’t need that! I’m just tired of not living the most fully integrated life, is all.”

“That’s hard for everyone, Kyle. That’s hard for straight people, too.” Kyle rolled his eyes, unsure if his father knew what he was saying. “Well, but, it is.”

“In this town, though, we don’t blame you,” Kyle’s mother added. He rolled his eyes at that, too. She chided him, “Don’t roll your eyes at me,” but Kyle was glad to hear it — in his own apartment, on a Sunday morning, coming out as normal as it ever did, like nothing had really changed for her. That, at least, was a relief.

Stan brought the sticky buns to the table and served them with coffee refills and spoonfuls of fruit salad; he told everyone the main course was on its way, and not to fill up.

“That seems impossible,” Kyle mumbled, though he knew he’d try at least a little of everything. Stan had never made sticky buns before. Yeasted dough was new to Stan — he’d probably never tried this hard in his life. Something occurred to Kyle: it was for him. 

Kyle’s mother asked him, “What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing,” said Kyle. “I mean — nothing, I’m okay.”

When Stan brought the eggs to the table, assembling the benedicts in an orderly fashion, Kyle’s mother asked him what had made him want to open a candy shop.

“I don’t know,” said Stan, sliding a slice of Canadian bacon onto an English muffin. “I honestly, truly have no idea.”

Something occurred to Kyle in a moment of clarity: “Stan just likes making people happy.”

“Isn’t that sweet,” said Sheila, like she was half-paying attention.

“If he makes you happy,” said Kyle’s father, “that’s all we care about.”

Kyle caught the embarrassed look on Stan’s face as he poured hollandaise onto his eggs out of a dainty gravy boat. “Oh, he does,” Kyle said, delighted. “He really, really does.”


	10. 22. two miserable people meeting at a wedding au [Craig/Clyde]

Around the time the DJ blares the “Macarena,” Craig regrets coming to this wedding. His fatal flaw is talking himself into doing things he doesn’t want to do; being a social person never brings the rewards it promises. At least gay weddings are usually tasteful, but this one is for a pair of men Craig doesn’t even like very much. Kyle and Stan were meant to be together and everyone knew it as early as preschool, when they were obsessed with playing “fireman,” a game that essentially involved whipping it out and peeing on each other. So what if they were toddlers? It’s basically disgusting. Craig couldn’t give a shit if gay marriage is legal now if he has to spend another weekend sitting through one of these things; this one has a cash bar and the entrée option was a choice of dry salmon or chicken kiev. If you’re going to get married on a budget, don’t even. Don’t try to squeeze everyone you ever met under a tent in Civic Center Park. It’s humid in here. It’s fucking tacky. Don’t bother. Your love is not so magical other people want to celebrate it, Craig thinks. If Token were here he’d say Craig was speaking not from the rational part of his brain, but the part that’s still annoyed that he’s just gotten over gonorrhea. Lucky Token ended up in DC at his cousin’s wedding this weekend, and had to send his regrets. Token will get an earful about this over a round of brandy Old Fashioneds when he gets back into town on Tuesday.

It’s time to go, Craig figures, a little too drunk to will himself to get out of his chair. It is stifling in this tent, and humid to boot; no one should get married in August, at least not out of doors. Everyone else from this table is dancing, which leaves Craig alone with his own thoughts: why did he wear his best slacks to this shitshow? Why did he waste his cheat day on pigs in blankets at the post-ceremony cocktail hour? There will surely be a cake-cutting soon, and Craig wants to be gone by then, because there is nothing he wants less than for the other guys sitting at this table to come back and start trying to capture Craig in small talk about his Labor Day plans. He’s going to Provincetown with Token as he’s done every summer for the past three years. It’s three weeks away and Craig is impatient to get there. He likes the dulcet warmth of early fall, the gentle breezes that carry leaves across the city sidewalks, the artificial pumpkin scent that wafts from every store when the door is opened. Fuck this summer shit and the blistering mediocre crackle of Eurotrash hits that reverberate from the speakers in every restaurant in Capitol Hill, the way bottle-blonde girls from the east coast wander in and out of Craig’s juice bar with their hair in unbalanced buns knotted on the top of their heads, asking how much the Green Queen is ($12) versus the cashew milk ($14) versus the carrot juice ($7, though he should raise the price). Fuck especially the guys who spend their Sundays sunning in the park, their powerful thighs falling open, copies of Vanity Fair on the grass next to them. One of those assholes gave Craig gonorrhea, and he’ll never get over it.

So Craig prepares to leave, gathering his wits about him. He’s searching for his car keys in his pants pocket as a harried man grabs him by the lapels of his shirt and says, “Gosh, don’t go! We need some good men for the hora.”

“The what?” Craig asks. It’s like something a Greek widow once spat at him as he walked down a cracked, cobbled road in Athens: the hora! No, actually, it’s like something a really hoarse drag queen would say at the sight of a stubby little dick: the hora, the horrah of it all! Something like that.

“The hora.” The little guy, with his sweaty, staticky cotton-honey hair all mussed in front of his face gestures to the DJ and the chairs being dragged to the center of the dancefloor and says, “I don’t know, it’s like a Jewish dance, they just said we need strong guys to hoist chairs!”

Maybe Craig’s being hit on. This dude’s got that fading-twink look, like, he got stuck on the luxury of free drinks for doe eyes at Solitary Confinement back when that place was all the rage and he regrettably forgot to grow up. But he’s making those doe eyes at Craig now and saying, “You look pretty strong.”

“I am pretty strong,” Craig agrees, though he can’t bench jack shit and wouldn’t want to anyway.

“And I’m Butters.”

“Is this hora a real thing?”

“It is, and they do need guys to help out. You weren’t going, were you?”

It’s Craig’s first weekend after completing his antibiotics. Time to get back on the horse. “Well, not if I’m needed.” It comes out kind of wispy. He lets Butters grab him by the hand and drag him over to the middle of the room.

On the sides of the dance floor some of Kyle’s relatives, mostly stout older women, are clapping their hands and beginning to form the loose outline of a circle. Craig knows them by their thick wrists, their hair piled high on their heads, the way they lean into one another and whisper things loud enough for everyone else to hear it. That’s very Kyle, pretty much precisely how Craig remembers him from school. Kyle is sitting on his chair like a fairy princess, his hands regally on his hips until he gets hoisted up into the air and he shrieks, clutching the bottom of his chair like he had no idea it was going to happen, though this is a Jewish thing and Kyle is the Jewish one so between the two grooms he should have been prepared.

Craig grabs one of the legs of Stan’s chair. This really shouldn’t be allowed at a gay wedding, since it puts Craig’s face in direct proximity to Stan’s crotch, at least momentarily. It’s not that Craig hasn’t been anywhere near Stan’s crotch ever, but the klezmer music is a huge boner killer, with or without the assistance of the well drinks Craig’s been slowly drinking. Had he not known it was a cash bar, he probably wouldn’t have driven, little good it did. Anyway, the thing with Craig is, he’s not made of stone; he’s a realist, and this is stupid, but there’s something fun about it too, and as soon as the chair part of the hora is over Butters’ sweaty hand is in his and they’re nearly running in a great mess of a circle around the dance floor. There aren’t many women at this wedding outside of the grooms’ families but there are swirling dresses and the sound of footfalls on parquet, and it’s not that Craig isn’t aware that this is stupid but suddenly it’s fun-stupid, and Craig gets a little dizzy.

So he doesn’t really notice that Butters is leading him out of the main tent and back into the holding pen that leads to the bathrooms. At the other end of it is the bar. “I’m going to freshen up,” Butters says, fanning himself with both hands. “That hora is sure brutal. Wait here for me?”

“Okay.” Craig watches Butters’ ass as he heads in the opposite direction, wondering whether maybe Butters has a hotel room or apartment they could defect to. Is he really going to do this? It’s hard to say whether Craig would be into it – true, he hasn’t hooked up for weeks, but it’s also pretty clear Butters is going to want to bottom. Craig can top, in theory, but it wouldn’t be his preferred way to get back into the game. He might as well wander over to the bar and get another drink.

With the dancing still on, there’s no line; in fact, there’s no one waiting around, so Craig walks right up to the bartender and asks for a whiskey sour.

“I don’t know if I can make that,” says the bartender. He’s a paunchy guy with messy brown hair, but he has that careful way of speaking that a lot of insecure guys get when they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Craig knows he gets that way himself, but he tries not to think about it. “We don’t have any egg whites,” the bartender says, shaking his head.

“Can’t you just make it without?” Craig asks.

“I guess,” the bartender, with such weary resignation that Craig almost wants to cancel his order, though he of course doesn’t. In his uncertain tone, the bartender says, “You drink a lot of fancy cocktails.”

Maybe it’s shocking that this guy’s been paying attention to Craig’s drink orders, but not the most shocking thing that’s happened tonight.

“I’m not judging you,” the bartender says quietly. He’s working, and Craig watches his grubby paws squirt lemon juice into a glass. “My dad used to drink those old-timey ones, too. It’s cute, I think it’s cute.”

“Are you saying you think your dad is cute?”

“He kind of is,” says the bartender.

“Okay?”

“I mean, in like, a general way, not like, I find him cute, I want to do him.”

“Are you being paid to talk to guests about how hot you find your dad?” Craig asks.

The bartender blushes. “No.” He looks away, and begins to uncap the bottle of whiskey.

“Because at this point, I am prepared to not be shocked by just about anything at this wedding.”

“Why? It seems okay.”

“Three different people at my table of ten squirted the butter from their chicken kiev onto themselves. But other than that, I guess it’s fine. I’ve got a guy waiting for me.”

“That guy you walked out with?” The bartender pours the contents of the glass into a cocktail shaker.

“Yeah, that guy. Not bad, right? A little past-due, but take what you can get, right?”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” the bartender says, “but I don’t think that guy was waiting for you at all.” He begins shaking the cocktail vigorously.

“Why? What do you know?”

“Well, turn around.” He slams the shaker down onto the table and points.

When Craig looks behind him, he sees Butters pressed up against a wall by an enormously fat guy whose entire pink button-down is soaked through with sweat like he’s just gotten off a log ride. To a rousing score of klezmer music, Craig turns back to face the bartender, defeated.

At least he’s immediately handed a drink. “You know what,” says the bartender, “this one’s on the house.”

Craig takes it, almost shocked by how beautiful it is: brownish yellow, garnished with a cherry, an orange slice, and a sparkly cocktail pick. Craig’s sick of those at every gay wedding. Enough already. He shakes his head, stunned. “I can’t not pay you,” Craig says, as if it’s the most pressing issue here. “I mean, these assholes are too cheap to spring for an open bar, like, it’s the one thing I can do–”

“Don’t worry about it,” the bartender says. He smiles, his cheeks so fleshy Craig can’t decide if he’s rather kiss them or pinch them. “That fat guy’s an asshole. He doesn’t tip, and he refused to pay me for two drinks because he said I skimped him on booze. But I still made the drinks. I still made the drinks! That’s not right. I hate this gig.”

Craig looks down into his glass. He hates to break the spell of its carefully curated perfection, but he has to take a sip for courage. He looks into the bartender’s eyes for a moment. They’re brown, muddy brown, but they’re also watery and sad like the eyes of every man Craig has ever loved. He swallows his mouthful of whiskey and asks, “What time do you get off?”


	11. 27. meeting at a support group au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Art by Nhaingen!

Stan was so, so sorry to learn that it was quite a bit like in the movies: he got up, he introduced himself, he was holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. A few coughs interrupted his speech. He pressed on. He tried to explain what he was thinking, how he was feeling. Was he embarrassed? No. Was this something he’d been made to do? Maybe. Was he going to try to connect, to give it his all? Yes, sure. Then he sat down again and received compliments on his bravery.

Bravery meant nothing to Stan. Who was he trying to impress? No one. He tried to listen to other speakers. Most of these guys seemed beat-down, world-weary. Some of them were defiant. Some cried. Most of them weren’t like Stan at all: not resigned, not without support, not yet broken. Stan felt broken. It was his first meeting and he was broken. There was no fixing this, he’d been told. He’d always live with it, always have to fight it back. The very thought was exhausting. Just 19, Stan spent the end of the meeting staring down the very thought of having to choose, every day, not to do it anymore. Do what? He didn’t know. Think about it, he guessed. Under the bandages his skin was burning.

It was a relief that they didn’t pray at the end of the meeting, or anything like that, for Stan was weary of self-help culture and loathed to be forced to pray. He didn’t believe in anything, not in himself and certainly not in false hope. He fidgeted through the end of the meeting, without having considered that when it was over, he’d have to think of somewhere else to go. He had a dorm room but if he went back there he’d have to confront his situation. The other guys in this group were all getting up and milling around. The cup in Stan’s grip was empty so he crushed it.

“Yeah,” said a boy standing behind him, “I do that too. It’s hard not to.”

Stan turned and saw that it was someone else from the circle, a redhead with delicate eyelashes. He still looked sort of like a boy, and Stan wondered if he was 19, too.

“It’s really a waste,” Stan said, trying to think of something, “because styrofoam is so bad for the ecosystem.”

“It’s too bad you crushed your cup, then. You could have used it for something else.”

“I don’t know,” said Stan, “it’s sort of been tainted with coffee.”

“Bring a cup next time. You know, like one of those reusable travel ones.” The redhead sat down. He seemed so tall when he was standing, but there on Stan’s level they could look into each other’s’ eyes. “I’m Kyle.” Kyle didn’t offer a hand; he kept them tucked into his pits. He didn’t speak at the meeting. “Actually,” he said, “I lied, I don’t drink coffee.”

“You didn’t say you drank coffee, you just said you crushed the cups.”

“Well, I would, if I did,” said Kyle. “I mean, drink coffee. If it helps you, you should do it. Crush the cups, I mean. I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of someone’s – coping mechanism.”

“I have other coping mechanisms.” Stan raised his arm and pulled down the sleeve of his flannel.

“I think the cup is a better choice.” Kyle reached out and then stopped.

“You can touch it, you know. If that’s what you were going to do.”

“Wouldn’t that hurt you?”

Stan shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Look, whatever else, I don’t want to intentionally hurt you.” There was a weird grin on Kyle’s face. “I’d rather hurt you slowly, after we knew each other for a while. I’m not trying to be creepy, it’s just fucked-up borderline stuff. I wanted you to know.”

It was nice that Kyle was giving him an out, but Stan drank in pain like it was an oasis he’d stumbled onto after many days of wandering and rationing. So he went with Kyle to the dining hall, because it was now after 9 and they both should have had dinner. Stan thought about his looming medieval history deadlines, but he reminded himself that he didn’t care about Clovis, Clovis was a monster, fuck Clovis. Merovingians were interesting before the meeting; now there was Kyle.

Kyle had a way of arranging cherry tomatoes on his plate that seemed to defy gravity. Same with his hair, which had all of the volume Stan’s lacked. In Kyle Stan saw something – he wasn’t sure of what, but something. It was important, Stan supposed, because his reaction to people had for so long been to stay away.

“It was this kid in my class,” Kyle was saying, as he ate his cherry tomatoes like hand fruit. “He was hugely fat. Even for a kid, even at 10. I guess I didn’t really think of myself as a victim or whatever, because he was just so annoying. I could like, handle him, you know? Sometimes if he got too horrible, I’d literally slap him. How could I be a victim, wasn’t I victimizing him? I mean, he was horrible, I knew he was horrible, but the worst part was that he was annoying – this cloying little voice, this way of antagonizing me. It was such a perfect imitation of how annoying kids are that I barely even noticed that what he was doing wasn’t normal.”

“It’s terrible,” Stan agreed, because what else was he supposed to say? “This kind of thing shouldn’t happen to people. I don’t even like people and I think people don’t deserve it.”

“I guess that just makes you empathetic.”

“Well, it makes me better than somebody, I’m sure.”

“Stan, please.” Kyle knocked over his tower of tomatoes. “You’re better than a lot of people.”

Stan hated it when people said nice things to him, but “you’re better than a lot of people” was a compliment by such a slim margin that he accepted it.

“I’m in Carver,” Stan said after the meal, heading in the direction of his dorm. Kyle had been following, the soft sound of his moccasins on the pavement a constant reminder that Stan was suddenly not alone.

“I’m in Dorset.”

“Do you want me to walk you back there?”

Kyle’s eyes brightened, and then dimmed again. “You probably shouldn’t,” he said. “I’d probably try to fuck you.”

“I’d be open to it,” Stan admitted. “It’s not like I’m a virgin.”

“Sometimes I like to pretend I am,” said Kyle.

Stan, who was a gender studies major, offered, “Well, it’s just a construction, anyway.” For some reason this made him think of Clovis.

Standing under a lamp midway between Stan’s dorm and the dining hall, Stan and Kyle stared at each other. “Have a great night,” Stan said, and they parted. He went back to Carver and crawled into the extra-long cot that was serving as his bed that year. He was grateful and not grateful that he had a single; if it hadn’t been a single he almost certainly wouldn’t have done half the things he’d done that year. He never would have ended up in the ER. Definitely not twice. Stan slept with the lights on and he had since he was 8. It was nice of the office for residential education to have given him this private room. It was very understanding. Everyone always had been understanding.

So why did Stan feel so misunderstood?

* * *

The fact that Stan had to return to another meeting the next afternoon was disheartening until he remembered that Kyle would be there. Kyle, with his poof of knotty hair, pretty lashes, and scabby ankles. How Kyle got scabby ankles, Stan didn’t know.

“They’re mosquito bites,”  Kyle said, catching Stan’s stare. “I have sensitive skin, and I probably shouldn’t scratch so much. I mean, easier said than done – it’s probably some kind of self-injury thing or whatever, like the way some people pick at their cuticles.” Kyle had brought a bag of gummy candies and was eating them right out of the paper sack. “These are Swedish.” He pulled the edges down and offered it, gaping open, to Stan. “Want one?”

A consummate candy-hater, Stan peered into the bag and found only primary colors staring back. The candies glistened. Stan’s stomach turned.

“Your loss,” Kyle said, crumpling the sack up again.

Today a boy named Butters – was it a boy? Stan wasn’t sure – spoke. It took up most of the meeting, defiant and cheerful. “I won’t let that get me down,” Butters kept saying. It had to be a boy, Stan figured. Everyone else was. He should have been paying closer attention to Butters, but it was hard with Kyle sitting right there, sugar crystals stuck to the corners of his mouth. Stan would lick them off if given the chance. He didn’t even like candy and he’d do it, just treat those little sugar crystals like the open door though which he could walk right into Kyle’s mouth. He probably shouldn’t have been thinking about that, though. He should have been listening to Butters, who was saying, “Well, that’s when I knew I was really in trouble.” Trouble with what, Stan wondered, trouble how?

People didn’t applaud in this group, which Stan appreciated. They were very no-nonsense about things. To be fair, Stan didn’t know if people in other groups applauded, but he’d really been dreading the applause.

After the final “thanks for coming” Stan pulled Kyle aside, asking for his number.

“Why?” Kyle asked.

“So I can call you,” Stan said.

“I don’t really talk on the phone.” Finally, Kyle brushed the sugar from his face, the paper bag long since smashed into a recycling bin. “Okay, give me your phone.”

Stan just served it up like it was nothing, though all kinds of threatening possibilities occurred to him between the time he unlocked it and the time Kyle began typing: if he lost his phone and something happened, no one’d ever find him. If he ended up alone somewhere and there was no one to verify his account, how would he catalogue it? But it seemed as though all Kyle wanted to do was send himself a text, which just said, “Hey.”

“There.” Kyle patted his back pocket as it vibrated. “Now we’re texting.”

The truth was, Stan did like to talk on the phone, and quite a bit at that. On the wall back from his meeting he called his mother, which he’d have done the day before if he hadn’t walked out with Kyle. “Well, you sound better today than recently,” his mother said, and he could hear that she was relieved. “Are the meetings okay?”

“I’ve only been to two,” Stan said, “and honestly, they’re sort of shitty. But there’s this kid there.”

“What kind of kid?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Stan. “His name is Kyle. And he’s sort of – like me. But not. I think. It seems like we’re similar. But, we kind of aren’t.”

“I don’t really know what that means.”

“I don’t know either,” Stan told her. Throughout the remainder of the evening he’d go on to think about it quite a bit. He sensed in Kyle some similar hesitance, and this was only encouraged by the fact that Kyle did not text all evening. By the time Stan was reading for his dreadful 9 a.m. seminar it became clear, though some means of mind-wandering distraction, that if Stan had asked for Kyle’s number, perhaps he’d better text first.

So he did. “Do you go to a meeting every day?” Stan asked.

“I really try to,” Kyle wrote back, “though clearly I couldn’t if I had some class or whatever.”

“Is this what you thought college would be like?” Stan replied.

“I am actually a very good student,” Kyle wrote, which wasn’t much of an answer. In a second text: “If you mean, texting with some guy at 1 in the morning when I have a class at 7:30, yes, basically.”

And then: “Or, at least I guess I hoped it would be kind of like that.”

“What’s your class?” Stan asked. (What he’d really wanted to say was, “Am I ‘some guy’?”)

“Intro to systems planning.” As Stan was blinking at it, he got another text: “I’m smart.”

It was impossible to parse; was Kyle implying Stan was not? He did worry about it sometimes. It took an awful lot of stupidity, or at least willful ignorance, to trust as much as Stan wanted to. He really, really wanted to.

“Are you a comp sci person?” Stan asked.

“Yeah.”

The thing was, Stan didn’t know quite what to say about it. “Cool,” he typed, nervous that it made him sound … vulnerable, or forward, or something like that. That’s how he’d gotten into trouble before – being impressionable, wanting to cater, having a genuine interest. It didn’t work; Kyle never texted back. He might have gone to sleep or back to studying or something, anything; Stan never found out. He passed out that night with his phone in his clammy palm, waiting and hoping for some reply text. Instead, he woke up at 8:30 with his pre-class alarm.

Jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and Stan stumbled into class feeling anxious about Chlodomer on Clothilde’s behalf and wishing he didn’t care so much.

* * *

Stan had friends from back home, just not at school with him, and he did think about letting them know how he was doing. At times he resented that they’d gotten out, really gotten out, as far as the East Coast and – in Wendy’s case – Britain, where she’d gone on a scholarship. He really envied her sometimes, but mostly he pitied himself. He wished he could have gone farther, but it was a portentous option with too many unknowns. Stan hated those unknowns like he hated himself, or like he hated Clovis, or like he began to hate Butters for monopolizing the forum at the nightly meetings Stan found himself attending regularly. Not that he could have opted out; it was comply with this or end up in a hospital somewhere. Anything was better than a hospital, but he didn’t like the meetings, either; they were like a bridge to Kyle, in the beginning, but as soon as he and Kyle began texting the meetings began to feel superfluous.

What were the other attendees like? There was an anxious chubby boy who said little, and whenever he spoke he demeaned himself; there was a sullen emaciated kid with huge dark eyes that were heavily lidded under his knit hat. Stan tried to regard these guys as peers, but the more he endured the clearer it became that Kyle was his only peer here. The rest of them didn’t have Stan’s problems, or maybe they had Stan’s central problem, the root cause of it all, but their symptoms were different.

Several weeks seemed to go by before Stan’s mother asked him, “I don’t mean to pry, but if you were going to date this Kyle guy, you would tell me, right?”

He knew why she had to ask. His past reticence hadn’t done him many favors.

Yet he demurred. “Nothing’s really happening,” he said, and that was true. They texted a lot; ate dinner together sometimes. Stan hadn’t seen the interior of Kyle’s room in Dorset, nor had Kyle ever set foot in Carver. They orbited each other in the most literal possible sense, meaning, they were never going to collide. Physically. In a sexual way.

Or so Stan had assumed. At first he’d been nervous, wondering what adult sex – or adult enough sex, consensual and legal and all that – would be like. He wasn’t a particularly sexual person, but he liked the idea of emotional intimacy. Sometimes he felt he was approaching this with Kyle; often he wondered if it weren’t an illusion conjured by the hours they’d spent together listening to other people (admittedly, mostly Butters) share their insecurities and unload their baggage. The first thing Kyle had ever heard Stan say, actually, was an unloading of his own. But when they were together Stan just waited, and waited, for Kyle to make a move. And he waited, and waited. And then summer was approaching.

Stan didn’t know much about college summers. Back in South Park he had worked in the library, playing folk songs for the kids on rainy Sunday afternoons and stamping circulation slips on Saturdays. He thought about calling the head librarian, Dorothy-Mildred, and asking her for a summer position – but it actually made his heart hurt to think that he hadn’t played his guitar all throughout the school year. There was too much, between Clovis and Clothilde, Judith Butler, and Butters’ afternoon stories about his domineering father and horrible Uncle Bud. There were Stan’s own private worries, the little incidents that had sent him to the group in the first place. Then there’d been Kyle – Kyle’s habit of eating chewy candies during meetings, and his slow, shuffling walk, his way of sweating under a hunting cap sometimes even indoors – and Kyle didn’t even hunt, was the thing, he just wanted to hide. “I hate my hair,” he’s say, but of course Stan loved it.

He grabbed his guitar – it was dusty, a real shame – and struggled through the afternoon rain as he walked behind the parking structure to get to Dorset. He texted, “I’m downstairs.” He waited a few minutes. He got a text back: “Coming.”

Kyle came down in his pajama pants, bare feet, and an argyle sweater.

“That’s quite a look,” Stan said.

“Like yours is better.” Kyle surveyed Stan’s dripping-wet hair and the soggy bottoms of his jeans. “Well, come on, let’s get you into something dry.” Kyle signed Stan into the dorm, though he had to leave his ID with a security guard.

It was shocking to learn that Kyle had a roommate, though the roommate wasn’t there. “He’s some kind of rower, or a hunter.”

“Is there, like, varsity hunting?” Stan asked.

“There’s varsity nothing at this school,” said Kyle. “Well, maybe varsity golf? Varsity nothing, well, varsity very little.”

It had been many long years since the word “varsity” and been uttered so often in Stan’s presence.

“Then again, it is Colorado, so maybe there’s hunting. I don’t know. So why’d you bring that guitar?” Kyle dug through his nearly folded clothing, possibly trying to find something for Stan to wear.

“I used to play it.” Stan untied his soaked Converses and gazed up at Kyle’s ass in pajama pants. Stan tried not to think about it naked. “Back before I got here. It’s like something another person did.”

Kyle held up a green T-shirt that said “Jew Scouts” and it was faded and gray underneath the armpits. “Were you going to play it for me?”

“No,” said Stan, “I guess I just wanted you to see it.”

“I’ll look away while you change, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t mind,” Stan said. He’d been here before, acting as if he really didn’t care. Like the last time, he actually cared a lot. He trusted Kyle, though. And he really didn’t mind if Kyle looked.

“You don’t look good in my shirt.” Kyle tented his fingers, appraising. “It’s too big.”

“I think this is a kid’s shirt,” said Stan.

“Well, it’s too big on you, you’re so thin.”

With nothing to say to that Stan sat on the bed, his boxers still mercifully dry enough that they didn’t soak into Kyle’s sheets immediately. It would be a slower penetration, not that Kyle’s sheets were clean enough, or even folded enough, for a little wet to make a difference. They were mostly bunched together near the foot of the cot, the same kind of cot Stan slept on in his room. It was a comfort to him, a small comfort. He settled in against the wall.

“Can I get you anything?” Kyle was creeping around the guitar, rubbing the strings with his fingertips so gently it didn’t make a sound. “I have some La Croix in my fridge.”

Stan spotted it under the desk, a little white one that he now realized was humming just barely audible under the tension in his own voice. “What flavor?”

“Coconut.”

“Coconut La Croix?”

“I figured I’d try it,” said Kyle. “I don’t really like it.”

“I’ll try it. They all taste the same. La Croix flavors, I mean.”

“You’re nuts.” Kyle got under the desk and opened the fridge. Stan could spot, in addition to the white cans of coconut La Croix: an open can of tomato soup, three stacked Lunchables, Sabra hummus, something that looked like a prescription from the campus health center. Stan knew that label. He hadn’t eaten Lunchables for years.

Stan looked at the tab on the can in his hands and slid his ring finger under it. Once it bent he replaced it with his thumb, cracking the seal with a metal hiss. Kyle was standing there by his roommate’s bed, holding its wooden frame from underneath one of the beams of the headboard. Stan couldn’t drink Kyle in fast enough. He nearly choked on his flavored water. “I really like you.”

“Yeah,” was all Kyle said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Kyle sat down on his own bed, clutching a pillow to his chest. “Well, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“Well, if you don’t like me back you’d better tell me. It’ll be summer soon, so—”

So what, Stan wondered. So he’d go back to South Park, at least for a while. So he’d get his library job back. So the town was small enough that Stan would see everyone he knew nearly every day, whether he wanted to or not. So the mayor would probably still be carrying on her affair with the chief of police, which had been going on during all of Stan’s shifts in the old conference room for as long as Stan had been working there. So he’d end up back there with his own personal ghosts, the ones Stan knew were waiting for him. Would he be old enough to duck them this time? It’s not like he had a boyfriend waiting for him or anything. What did it have to do with Kyle?

Kyle lunged at Stan and the bridges of their noses collided, so their first kiss was smothered in the sting of freshly bruised cartilage. Stan would have a swollen nose for a day or two. It was pain he was happy to tolerate. Kyle had said, upon their first meeting, that when he hurt Stan it would be slow, but this came on so quickly and buried in so much excitement that Stan hardly noticed. And when they parted, the pain lingered.


End file.
